


Delirium

by cimorene



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Angst, First Time, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-03
Updated: 2009-12-03
Packaged: 2017-10-04 03:15:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cimorene/pseuds/cimorene
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"How did I get to be the damsel in distress?" Dom gave him a level look that said all it needed to. Good point. Fuck. Elijah sighed and knocked back the rest of his drink in one.</p><p>Billy snorted.</p><p>"Don't worry," said Dom soothingly, smirking. "I'll save you."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Half-Mad

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by K'Sal, without whom I'd have been utterly lost. Thanks to Wax Jism (now my wife, at time of writing just my fandom crush), for various stolen ideas and general cuteness; Buffett, for invaluable early idea-bouncing; and [KK](http://kmazzy.livejournal.com), Gloria Mundi, [Calico](http://ukcalico.livejournal.com), and [Guinevere](http://guinevere33.livejournal.com) for audiencing and suggestions.

Elijah had this odd hallucination-fantasy. Thing. In it he was lying down, in bed, on the edge of sleep (in the dream--dreaming about being asleep, which is. Odd. In an inside-out and paradoxical way, but Lij was too lazy to think much about that). Mostly on his back, tired in a good, long-day, drinking-but-not-drunk kind of way, his legs flung carelessly apart on his back head on pillow eyelids oh-so-heavy. Head turned sideways: you want to catch the breeze from the open window, even if it presses intrusively cold on your cheek, because you can't replace the feel of it on your face in the middle of the night. Lethargy.

And it was in those long months before--maybe, he thought fuzzily, maybe it really was before Dom came, and he dreamed it more than once and now he was just remembering it? ...It was before Dom came and he was in bed, alone in the house, ready to sleep the sleep of the virtuous, buzzing with vague happy thoughts which, in real life, would have meant talking to a friend, probably Dom, but in the dream were rather background noise. Realistic, so far, no? And in the dream there was a whisper of disturbance--no sound, no air, just--it.

The huskily-whispered word, "Lijah." The way you talk in the middle of the night, in a darkened bedroom, if you are Dom. His face shrouded in shadows bending over Elijah, who felt a stippling hard wash of pleasance all over him, cool and warm at once, but not surprised. Sleepy and languid, dream-Elijah lifted a hand and gripped his friend's wrist, the most natural thing in the world, and tugged him off-balance, down into a hug.

Dream-Dom might have made some kind of startled tensing movement, or that was just what Lij expected. He arrived, unannounced, at Lij's house halfway around the world--in the dream--and let himself into Lij's bedroom in the middle of the night, magically, and was surprised to be hugged? But that was Dom, as startlingly contradictory as the fresh soap and stale airplane smell on his neck which Elijah's subconscious conjured with dismaying clarity and a tickling cool whiff of moving air. "Come here," Elijah dreamed that he murmured. In the dream he didn't have to wait--in the dream, he could ask.

Even in the dream he had to acknowledge it would be awkward, Dom clambering onto the side of the bed without being allowed to stand up, as Lij's arm was looped around his neck and, far from loosening, drawing him slowly closer. He wasn't satisfied until he had a rather heavy sprawling armful of bemused Dom.

He thought he was--but then there was a soft "Ummm" sound, or a string of them, from Dom, and the Dream-Lij, practically already asleep, felt it curling around him in a long liquid stream of murmuring and warm breath on his neck as he curled against Dom, and then it was darkness and warmth and an impossible tangle of arms and legs. You'd have thought he'd never been cuddled before; it was almost as if he never had, this innocent, heady--okay, well, not entirely innocent--tumbling trembling shower of dream. In the dream or out of it, it was wish-fulfillment. That Dream-Lijah, though, was the first Elijah to realize as much.

It was funny that he hadn't realized it before the dream--although again, if he'd had the dream more than once. Before Dom came to LA and after. Elijah kept trying to get a grip on the hazy thought that was drifting away from him--why was he remembering the dream _now_, whenever he'd had it--but it was no use. He was happy enough to simply remember it, uhm, and the soft mm of Dom's mouth, where? Near his ear, he thought. He would have frowned if he could, then, because--he was forgetting again? He had been awake for too long.

And when he thought of it, how long was _that?_

Pressing intrusively cold on his cheek, the hard floor, and the sweet slice of blood on the back of the sides of Elijah's tongue, sticky and rapidly cooling, he could feel it, on his lip. It was the doorsill digging into his back, not an elbow or knee or any other part of Dom. There was also, unfortunately, the very unwelcome presence of pain radiating and pulsing from his hip, which felt as though it might be bruising, and he thought, since he was on the floor, that it had--

Why was he on the floor?

That was it; Elijah felt the last ribbons of the dream escaping him and gave a sigh of regret. Blood, cold and hard, the unforgiving pressure of tile on the back of his head. Ow. His eyes itched; he was too tired and blurry to lift his hand and rub them.

But it probably _would_ be a good idea to get up from the floor.

He was afraid he was not going to be able to recapture the dream later. He summoned strength to stand with reluctance.

And stopped, and summoned again. He had to lean on something to stand up, and when he was up all the way and came to himself leaning heavily against it realized it was the doorframe of the bathroom. Again, he didn't remember standing up all the way, and his vision was clearing, but he didn't remember the blackout.

Apparently he was pretty fucking sick.

He was at the bathroom, so he thought he'd just--why was he here? There'd been hot and cold prickles all up and down Elijah's arms, he knew now, when he'd first woken up in bed, and that had made him decide not to get up at all. Then he'd realized he was going to throw up, and--ah.

Stumbling towards the toilet, tumbling down on his hands and knees and landing, face pressing against the cool ceramic of the seat and his eyes closed on another dream image as if it'd been a cobweb he'd fallen through. Dom's face buried in his neck in the dream. Dreaming Dom, out of nowhere, nuzzling against his ear. Snuggling into Dom's arms because it was so fan.fucking.tastic.

Kiss. Had there been a kiss?

Oh, God, he wanted so hard and had for so long that sometimes the sheer weight of it made his head hurt, crushed the air from his lungs. Elijah felt his stomach clench up in a pang of need--or possibly that was illness and unrelated--and start to turn inside out, with a weak lurch. He managed to lift his face a little. He had turned the light on, or left it on, maybe. It was too damned bright. He braced his hands on the floor and closed his eyes and leaned over the toilet, but he couldn't seem to throw up. After a while he realized this must be because he'd hardly eaten anything the day before.

Or if that had been Wednesday maybe he hadn't eaten anything yesterday--which had been Thursday--hadn't it?

_Help,_ he thought dizzily. Oops, sitting up too fast. Or maybe he shouldn't sit up at all.

Huh.

It certainly wasn't out of the ordinary to dream about Dom, even if you discounted the fact that his state of mind, with relation to Dom, was sort of like a lovesick puppy. Even without that Dom was his best mate, though, and it wasn't like he had never slept cuddled up in a heap with someone he didn't fancy--huh? Lost himself there. Licking. Fancy in general but especially licking. The perfect flat snub of his little puppy nose and his bright brilliant eyes. His long, long neck. Had there been licking in the dream? Lij wasn't sure. Should have been, though. Maybe when he put his face in Dom's hair. Dom was oddly fastidious, his little British accent, washing his hair multiple times in one day if it "felt" dirty. Frowning in distaste ostentatiously, now, at Elijah's smokes, where early he'd tried not to look too disgusted, so as not to offend, but of course it didn't really matter--he was quite fuckable either way.

Elijah tried to groan and couldn't. Which was when he remembered the toilet and realized he was lying on the floor. It took him another five seconds, count 'em, five, to sit up and lean against the shower stall. Maybe the help was a good idea. He tried to call for Dom, whose room was right around here. Voice came out in a pathetic tinny croak. EW.

He closed his eyes again to gather his strength for crawling and wondered what was wrong with him.

Pretty soon he was going to have to start crying. Like a fucking girl! Or, well, like a very sick hobbit. Aaaaaaah.

There was dirt on the floor, and where his legs were folded under him awkwardly he realized dumbly the pressure of his weight was making its cool grit dig into flesh gone suddenly tender, like his skin was as paper-thin as it looked in the hollows of his hips. He wondered if when he moved the dirt would be embedded there. Red ugly splotches with dirt in them. Dom would think they were cool, if he could manage not to cry. Elijah tried to take more of his weight on his hands and felt his eyes closing. Fuck, no. But if you can't move, you can't.

It was a long way to the bathroom door--at least five or six scooting-sliding laborious movements. His legs hurt and his hands hurt where the floor pressed up on them. He wanted to curl up--not touching anything. In the middle of the fucking air, floating. Warm. Naked. Uhhhh. Dark. Darkness sounded really, really good. He wanted to lie down and think, because before on the floor he'd been having a pretty good time with his dreams of Dom.

God, he was a fucking mess.

If he lay down on the floor now he might not get to Dom, and the tireder he got, the more that seemed like it might not be such a bad thing. "Dom," he tried to say again, and swayed dizzily into the door, banging his head on it.

A solid thud of impact, and he was just glad to have something to lean against. It didn't hurt. Dom's room was only one door down.

Maybe he'd better not stand up, though.

He thought about lying on his stomach, flat, but his stomach put up a protest at the idea and he felt nauseated again.

_Fucker,_ he told his stomach smugly through the choking grip of hot revulsion around his throat: there was no way he was going to throw up on such an empty stomach. Falling to the floor, therefore, happened sort of sideways, and thank God this time his elbow was on the carpet. Carpet. Soft. Elijah allowed himself to rest for just a minute, with his face in it smelling dust and dirt--ew, increasing the nausea again and he couldn't get up. Good thing he hadn't decided to slither--like a snake. He almost giggled. A snake in crackling underbrush in the forest! Dry, slithery snake-Lijah, with his skin burning up and prickling like sweat, only he wasn't sweating. And his hair was dirty. Dom would think that was gross.

Dom.

Closing his eyes and sitting up at once: _not_ the best idea he'd had even since the onset of this whatever-the-fuck-it was, back in bed an eternity ago. Dom's door was not as far away, after all, as it had seemed from in the bathroom. And thank God it was closed, because that way he could knock on it. "Dom!" He called, and tried to sit up. Cleared his throat and said it again like English and not the Black Tongue, leaning on the wall. Hard, too hard, dusty carpet on his hands. He wasn't moving but it felt like rugburn. All of his skin turned fucking-inside-out with ouch. And where was Dom? Maybe he could just slide down the wall onto the floor without--

"Lij?" Light and steps and a thud on the floor, Dom on his knees, that jarred Lij's head on the wall and made him wince. "Lij!" Again, electric with panic.

"Mmh," Elijah mumbled protestingly.

"What's wrong?"

Please, Dom, touch me. He opened his eyes and blinked at Dom silhouetted against Too Much Fucking Light. "I don't--feel--" his face was hot, and he was discovering that he didn't like to talk either.

Luckily, Dom seemed to have heard his thought, because hands were wrapping around his upper arms, tugging him off-balance. He closed his eyes; he knew he would land against Dom's chest. "Can you stand?"

"No," he said. "I--passed out, in the hall. Once. Or, no. Maybe twice. Once in the bathroom. Three times?"

"I'm calling an ambulance."

He would have clung if he'd had any energy. He didn't, so Lij settled for whimpering, "Don't leave me."

Dirty hair stroked off his hot-dry forehead with no sign of a wince, and Dom said, "I won't," and picked him up like a baby. Whoa, dizzy! He closed his eyes. How nice, the smell of clean Dom and soap and sweat, and almost like in his dream, except for the feeling like shit. He wanted to kiss, or lick, but that would probably be a bad idea. "Just a friendly, germ-laden, platonic heterosexual lick." Riiiiiight.

Then a little swoop that made Elijah frown, but at least they were in darkness again, and he landed in softness. Bed?

He'd been going to the hospital.

But no, this must be Dom's bed. And Dom was picking up the phone next to it one-handed--as Elijah seemed to, surprisingly, still have hold of the other (hold, death grip...).

* * *

Lij, for some reason, thought about sex for the entire ambulance ride, while a pleasantly chubby motherly lady fluttered over him and made bracing jokes. "This isn't going to hurt," she said of an IV, "except a little stick right at first."

Five minutes later it was still pinching and pulling. Lij thought about saying "my arm still hurts" in a brief hiatus from plotting moving-ambulance-sex.

See, the cots are really small and narrow. And it's all uncomfortable because it jolts when it goes over bumps. Which could, you have to admit, make for some really hot sex. Getting Dom into the ambulance alone might be tough, and then there'd be getting him to agree to have sex, but hey. Lij was hot, right? Heterosexuality would fall before him.

So. The ambulance would be tootling merrily along and go over a bump--like that one--ow motherFUCKER, as the IV jerked in his arm and he gritted his teeth--and they'd be naked and sweaty with the sheet coming off. Lij would wrap his legs around Dom's hips. They'd be panting. "Fuck me," he'd say, and Dom would laugh because he laughs at random things when he's not so much amused as, oh, nervous (although in this case, hopefully turned on).

Unfortunately, the arrival at the hospital interrupted his musings, and Lij was forced to answer questions again, when all he wanted to do was sleep. And drink some water, and stop hurting, and lick Dom, and, well, maybe he wasn't so easily satisfied after all.

While he was wondering vaguely if he should ask about Dom, they stopped him in the middle of a hallway somewhere, and the motherly lady and the ambulance driver seemed to be involved in some kind of fucked-up-edly cheerful banter with the nurses. "Where should we put him?"

"There's 3C," said a grasshopper-like tall thin doctor, and

"2D," offered a nurse in some kind of flower-patterned scrubs that were not exactly confidence-inspiring.

"Maybe you'd better leave him in the hall," said the receptionist, and Elijah thought idly that that was a lame idea, except maybe if they left him there long enough, and she moved her head a little to the right, he could see out the window into the waiting room and see Dom.

"No," replied the doctor jauntily: "I can't examine him in the hall." Greeeeeeeeeeeat. Where was Dom? Lijah almost whimpered. He was cold, the fucking IV was pulling and burning at his arm, and he'd landed in the Emergency Room from Hell. All it needed now was the country music video channel on TV and maybe a long string of knock-knock jokes.

"Flip a coin," said the ambulance driver. He and the motherly lady were leaving. Elijah thought he heard her say as the door closed behind them that coins didn't have three sides.

So they left him in the hall, not even long enough to go to sleep, which was moving up on his list of desired things, even though he was still cold, with a sore arm from the stupid fucking needle and whatever was in the IV. It wasn't salt or water or whatever, either, because it was like his whole arm was... high. And it wasn't at all cool. Meanwhile he was freezing, and the blanket the nurse put on him was folded in half and still too fucking thin, and plus it didn't cover him up all the way. If he moved at all--and the cot was uncomfortable--he got drafts of cold air.

All alone would be good, and darkness, yes, and quiet. And cuddling. He wouldn't say no to a nice cuddle from Dom. It was getting to the point where he wouldn't refuse one from Orli if it warmed him up, despite the risk of jokes.

Before he could even pretend to go to sleep--while he was still settling down to decide what he would say, when they finally let him see Dom, to extort a cuddle--a nurse came up with a clipboard and wanted a million little bits of information that Dom could easily have told them. What did he weigh, did he have insurance, was he 18 (he almost snapped at her).

Elijah was too tired for smart-ass comments, although he did think vaguely of informing her, when she asked if he'd been feeling strangely lately, that there was no way he could be pregnant. Too apathetic, though.

If they'd just let Dom the fuck in, _he_ would entertain Lij--even without being asked, because _that_ was something he always seemed to know, as soon as he should, and sometimes before Elijah thought of it himself.

Fuck.

Sleep?

* * *

It's not the beginning and it's not the end but he'll never stop remembering it. Elijah on the floor on his knees in a version of his living room bleached sepia and gray by drawn curtains and late morning sun stretched thinner than it can go. His mind, though, had been a thousand miles away, in England, on the other side of the world--caught in bemused contemplation of the things Dom said to him, casual morsels of affection dropped so carelessly. And maybe, just maybe, he'd thought a few times about the round soft "O" of Dom's mouth, too.

His face hurting had been what made him realize that he was smiling, and when he realized that it had been a short step to the bitter wonder of knowledge he lived with now. He'd been on the phone in the kitchen the last he'd remembered, and when he came to himself he'd realized only dully that it must have been some time since then--some time of his hand gripping the short pile of the carpet, his head bent, his eyes wet and his mouth unable to contain the curve of its own smile.

Eyes wet, and he hadn't known it, until now--it had been the smile that made him cry. It was because, he thought, he could still smile around the odd hurt of it, like the sweet addictive rush at the end of tonguing a loose sore tooth when you're little, a thick cord of feeling that you love _because_ of its sharp edges, not in spite of them.

Now, months later, now that Dom was here, and he could hardly remember what it had been like before that day when he knew, he couldn't even be sure that it hadn't happened before the day he remembered without him noticing. He knew he was dreamy and tended a bit to go off in a haze of thought to his own little world, drifting in and out of memory and daydream and reality and smiling with stubborn pleasure in the face of grief, without ever knowing it.

Remembering it even now in the hospital bed. Couldn't stop smiling, and Dom was out there somewhere in the waiting room or something, probably trying to remember Elijah's address. The phone number wouldn't be a problem, of course. Such strength and such feathery wondering heat on the back of his neck, wrapping in a low necklace around to his collarbone, that he'd thought he'd never felt it before, then. Of course every time, every scandalous forbidden warm thought, felt the same, but you never get used to it--every one was still a revelation.

That was not the end, which hadn't come yet. It was not the end of the beginning, because that must have happened in New Zealand, or maybe at one of the premieres. But it was something, something important, the beginning of knowledge. That was when he'd been thoroughly and utterly caught, tangled in the sticky tragedy of irony and nostalgia and tenderness and pure, simple lust. Too late to struggle. The sunlight had stretched around the edge of the curtains, a narrow heavy bar on the floor, not yet white in the dim gloom, and he had had no desire to move and none to stop smiling.

He didn't know how long he lay there, but he didn't come close to sleeping. He stayed about the same distance from it, actually, which is that place where he was pettish and snappish and he didn't really want to move but he kept moving anyway because he couldn't get comfortable.

A nurse came in with what looked like a kindergarten teacher's art supply tote, purple plastic and covered with holographic stickers, and pulled out of it little glass vials and a syringe.

Could the day get _any_ better, he thought sarcastically?

"They told me the IV wouldn't hurt," he said conversationally, staring straight through the ceiling, which was composed of periodically pierced pasteboard tiles, white, and each one had thirty little perfectly circular holes in it.

"It doesn't really, does it," said the small fluttery nurse without looking at him. It didn't seem to be a question, but Elijah answered anyway.

"Well, no, it just burns and itches and pulls and... creates pain."

The nurse laughed dutifully and said, "I just have to draw some blood."

So _that's_ what the syringe and vials were for. He bit back the retort and said instead, "Okay. They had some trouble finding my pulse when they took my blood pressure."

"Hm," she said, bustling around the head of the bed with some alcohol wipes and other various things. He closed his eyes. For God's sake.

Her hair was dyed, dark fake auburn which was really more maroon, with rich chestnut roots showing, a much prettier color. A long mass of it in a low ponytail, with little baby curls loose around her face. She had a bit of a snub nose, too, and some freckles, but her face was too delicate, and he _wanted_ Dom.

"This isn't going to hurt for but a second," she said reassuringly, misinterpreting whatever expression had taken hold of his face.

"My friend," he replied before he could stop himself, "I think he's in the waiting room--can I see him?"

The prick came before the sentence was finished. "They should let him in in a bit," she soothed.

"It just seems like I've been here for so long, and most of it with nothing to do."

"Almost done. --I'll see about it, how's that?"

"Thank you," he said, listening to the click as she changed vials.

* * *

So now, thanks to Nurse Kindergarten, he had no arms remaining without pain, and that was on top of being so weak he had to think hard before he picked one up. A different nurse, the blood pressure one, breezed in to give him a paper cup of water and tell him to drink it, and breezed out again before he could ask about Dom or about anything else. Elijah shifted his head irritably in the bed and wondered why hospital beds didn't have pillows and where the thermostat was, and why there wasn't a tv. He would have settled for just about anything. Sleep, of course, would have been the nicest, but he could hear the grasshopper doctor in the hallway, the door open and antiseptic neon light licking across the foot of his bed.

The nicest after Dom.

Now, Dom would be nice: he wouldn't even probably need extra blankets, then, because he could just look pitiful and get Dom to warm him up. Dom wouldn't want to climb into a hospital bed, but there was no saying (Lij thought a bit hysterically) that there wasn't plenty of extra room, as thin as he was. The IV was in his right arm, and his left was stinging a little still at the elbow from the bitchiness of the needle and those narrow evil little tubes of his blood, jewelled ruby when they'd caught the light.

He'd lie about the left arm, though, and look pale and sad and tired (thereby imperilling his friend's blithe heterosexuality even further, no doubt. Haha), and scoot over and say no one would notice and shiver. Dom would climb in cautiously. Elijah was small, but he was pretty sure they'd discover that the narrowness of the bed made for close quarters anyway and they'd have to curl up around each other. Maybe with Dom against Elijah's side, since he couldn't move his right arm without setting off waves of pulsing tingling heat and prickles. It seemed to be more or less in a state of equilibrium, as long as he didn't move it, --or as long as nothing happened in the room, or as long as he didn't breathe too fast and the IV wasn't possessed by the devil. So, it wasn't _that_ predictable.

But--surely he'd forget that if Dom were there--he couldn't imagine not. And it wasn't as though he'd never been cuddled against Dom before, in the back seat of a Jeep in New Zealand (and it still drove him insane that he hadn't paid more attention, then), on the couch in their hobbit cabin or in Elijah's house or any number of other times, but a _real,_ in-bed cuddle was different. Especially when you're sick and miserable and getting so terrified of your own body and not knowing what the fuck is wrong with you that you second-guess everything--the hot, the chill, the shivers, the prickles--and you only want to forget. Dom would be so close, maybe he would be able to feel Dom's breath on his face. He _hoped_ he would. Suddenly he was sure there was no other way in the universe he could sleep.

However, the daydream itself was _almost_ enough to soothe him to sleep. He spared no attention to detail in conjuring the feel of Dom's arms around him and the warmth and the way he would press wantonly back and burrow closer, and twine their ankles together. The thought made him quite giddy. Ankles getting tangled! It seemed so, so _permanent._ So much so that it made his eyes start to sting again and he sighed and blinked a few times.

And that was when Dom's voice broke into his reverie from the door. "Are you asleep?"

His eyes flew open. Had he ever been happier to see anyone? God knew what kind of imbecilic smile he was producing. "Dom." Oops, nice try. Clear throat. Try again. "Dom." Keep the eyes wide. He needed to start on pitiful _now_ to coax Dom into bed.

Dom was walking towards the side of the bed, staring at him with a kind of horror that was actually a little funny (especially in a state of mind like this), picking up his feet as slowly as if they'd been stuck in flood of honey on the floor.

Honey... the thought made his stomach turn over. Had he eaten yesterday? He couldn't decide if it made him hungry or not-hungry, or thirsty, or all three. Nauseated, definitely; that wasn't in question. A nausea that was just as tired of the rest of him, limp and listless while his arm was eaten up with the quick-moving cold of whatever-the-fuck it was in that plastic IV bag

"Are you alright?" Dom said quietly.

Elijah nodded a little, as the safest answer, and paused to lick his lips. "But--" an artful shiver.

"Are you cold?" Dom's eyebrows drew down and together. His pissed-face never looked very scary so much as funny or cute or both, with the little point of his round nose, his deep-curved lips and glistening soft eyes. "I can't believe they--it _is_ cold in here. I'm gonna get a nurse. Wait--" He dove at a metal chest that looked more like a file cabinet stretched out of shape than like anything else. "--Maybe in here."

Damn. What if he found the blankets? Not that Lij didn't want blankets, but he was getting very _very_ fixated on the idea of touching, here. Would he be able to handle the disappointment? He watched Dom anxiously and couldn't prevent his face from doing whatever pitiful things it wanted to when his friend (hahaha) turned around with a flannel sheet in his hands. From Dom's suddenly alarmed face, that had probably been a good thing.

Another shiver, for good measure. They might not have long! Into bed as quickly as possible. "I'm really cold," he tried, "and the sheet is cold too! It's like I'm, I dunno, cold from the _inside,_" he explained. Cold from the inside--that was sort of deep, actually, especially if you thought about the loneliness, because hadn't he been so--well, cold--inside for weeks? Wow.

Dom was looking even more worried, standing there frowning and saying, "Did you tell them--shit, Lij!"

"No, not like sick-cold, really cold, just very, very cold, so much that it's inside too, you know, and, and tired and..." whoa, he was making him_self_ cry. Take that, Mr. I'm-Straight-Monaghan.

Dom was starting to look frantic, eyes wide, deer-in-the-headlights. Perfect! Elijah pounced. This was okay to ask for, surely? But I was desperate, guv.

"Could you--get in the bed too? For a minute? I think I might feel better--I just feel so." And that was really all he had to say, because instead of arguing or glancing at the door, Dom blinked a few times and drifted closer to the edge of the bed to take his hand, and said,

"If I'll fit."

Lij had to remember to act tired and cold as opposed to eager while wriggling over sideways in the bed.

"And if the nurses don't like it," Dom grumbled, "they can suck my dick, because I'd like to know how _else_ I'm meant to get you warm!" Elijah was cheering silently. It was getting to be harder work to look tremulous when he smiled, he was afraid, but then again, he had no idea what he looked like. He might look just as pitiful with a real smile, and he was so tired. Maybe relaxing his face was the best bet. And snuggling up with Dom, but not going to sleep, at least, not at first, because he certainly didn't want to miss any of it.

Dom clambered up onto the bed rather awkwardly and lay on his side, and Elijah offered him the edge of the blanket, which reminded Dom of the flannel sheet. Soon that was spread over both of them, and under its shelter in a confusion of limbs they eased gingerly closer together until Lij felt a chin in his hair and a chest against his back and his shoulderblade--he was really turned only about _half_way on his side. Flexing the fingers of his left hand idly made little twinges at the elbow, and he tucked it back against his side and found some more of Dom--a muscular forearm leading to a solid, finely-shaped square hand. It didn't take long at all before he was too warm and blissful to sort out what shape was what, and it wasn't even too long after that before the excited racing of his heart settled down to an even rhythm.

He nestled back against Dom, trying to be both innocent and suggestive, when really, he was probably too tired for both. Mmmm. It was working, then. And maybe he really would be able to sleep.

* * *

He woke up alone but feeling rather rested, disoriented and thirsty and weaker than a kitten, with no idea how long it had been. He had to blink at the clock a few times before its numbers resolved out of fuzziness and into a time in his head--it was already noon. And _when_ had he woken Dom this morning?

A long fucking time ago.

He still didn't know how long he'd been asleep, and was just starting to emerge from the drifty-end-of-sleep phase into the where's-Dom-what's-going-on phase when the blood pressure nurse leaned around the door again.

"If you're feeling alright," she said, like that was a complete sentence that Elijah could understand. He scrubbed his hand across his eyes and frowned and nodded.

Then he dared to try a "better." It didn't come out as croaky as he'd expected.

"Well," said the nurse, coming the rest of the way into the room and displaying a manila folder full of colored papers and small print, "like we said before--" (they did?) "--you've been pretty dehydrated. We've given you an IV to take care of that, and you should be able to walk now. Did you drink that water? Good, let's try to walk..."

"Have you been vomiting?" Asked the nurse solicitously as they were walking. Elijah was nonplussed until he realized she was trying to find out why he was dehydrated.

"Uh, no, I just..."

"Have you had diarrhea?"

He had a vague memory of telling people this already--but maybe it was another nurse. Or a doctor? Anyway. "No, I just really haven't been. Uhm." And everytime he said it, it somehow got stupider. Maybe now would be a good time to trip--except the floor looked hard and very far away, and he still wasn't feeling so great. "...I haven't been eating or drinking a lot," he finished in a reluctant mumble.

"You know everyone needs 8 to 10 glasses of water a day," chirped the nurse.

"Oh really?" Said Elijah politely, thinking privately that the entire medical profession was fucked. Right, one serving of dessert, ten glasses of water, and 6 vegetables and 11 whatsits, grains, per day? Nooooooo thank you.

The nurse was dragging the bag of IV fluid after him on its little pole and letting him lean on her arm. Not that he wanted to, but it seemed like a pretty good idea considering his fainting problem earlier. And considering the way the lights overhead were spinning a bit dizzily. They took the IV out, taped a bandaid on the crease of his elbow so he wouldn't bleed too much, and gave him a pen to sign some colored papers. ...His firstborn and his kidneys, for all he knew, as he didn't even glance at them. Then they made him go out into the waiting room, when Dom still hadn't appeared, yet, and Lij hadn't had time to wonder where Dom was in all that time but that hadn't stopped him from wondering.

Nothing could have.

He slumped with relief when he pushed through the door and Dom's head snapped up from over a magazine open in his lap. The magazine was a slick black heap on the floor--glossy pictures, you know, with the light from the window, bright and summer-hot, turning a big square of it to white. His eyes snagged on the shape of it on the floor for long enough that Dom almost swept him off his feet before they'd even made eye contact. Okay, well, not swept him off his feet, but eased up next to him with supernatural speed and taken all Elijah's weight on his shoulder and arm, somehow.

Which felt nice. He gave a little sigh and relaxed, and when Dom said, "Ready?"

The first thing he said was "Get me the fuck out of here" with a glowing smile. It didn't occur to him until they were in the parking lot to ask if Dom had driven his car.

Dom gave him an innocent look.

"You don't have a driver's licence," Elijah said, trying not to laugh for fear his knees would give out. Dom unlocked the passenger door.

Dom shrugged. "You just have to remember to drive on the right, and everything's fine."

When the door cracked open and he slipped--or more like slid, really, like a limp puppet--into the passenger seat, Lij was still a little worried about riding with Dom. He strapped in easily enough, thinking it was odd how normal he felt--the same as always, only maybe a bit hollow, or thin-stretched.

He was asleep before the car was out of the parking lot.

* * *

Dom was determined that Elijah wasn't getting out of bed until he felt better, but Elijah could do nothing in his own bed but quiver and feel stupid--certainly not sleep. He was so wired that Dom finally picked him up--blankets and all--and walked briskly across the hall with him. Elijah was too weak to tense up, or he would have. As it was, it was an effort to keep his head erect with the smell of Dom teasing his nose.

He was put pretty unceremoniously in the center of Dom's rumpled bed and left alone long enough to untangle his blankets and burrow shamelessly into the spare sheets, breathing deeply.

Damn, and he'd thought he was too tired to get turned on?

Only Dom.

Lij tucked a blanket more securely around himself and closed his eyes. The whole room was awash in a dim gray light, sun spilling in from his room across the hall, mostly, as the window on this side of the house faced the wrong way. The door to the hall'd been left open, and there was a big slanted square of white painted on the floor leading from it like a royal carpet. The whole feel of the room was wet--Lij's skin too-sensitive, rubbery, the sheets around him in warm swathes and when he closed his eyes, the black wasn't still, and he could lose track of where his arms and legs were--mm.

And daydream a better source for the smell of Dom than the rapidly-warming sheets, if, for instance, the origin of the faint sweaty musk happened to slide back into the bed with him, and he could bury his face in Dom's neck and press his nose at that little tear-drop hollow between his collarbones.

When Dom asked if he was going to have to sit on Elijah to keep him still, the answer was "Probably" with the kind of face that Dom had been known to call "cheeky." He said it jokingly, but Dom understood that it was essentially true. Well, of course sitting _on_ Elijah wasn't exactly necessary--staying near would work just as well. Like, say, a few centimeters, ideally. (Elijah had nothing better to do for almost a week while Dom would hardly let him move but watch the shadows move on the wall and on Dom's face, and think, and imagine, and wonder, and just generally drive himself crazy.)

He knew things about Dom that he had never been told, things he didn't even tell himself until it was time for him to need to know them, when they sparkled on the tip of his tongue and made him blink. He knew that he could whine and bitch and still get Dom's attention, partly because Dom felt guilty but mostly just because he was nice and it was in his nature to worry. He knew the fastest way to get Dom's attention was to be too tired to try to get it. When he heard a song sometimes he knew Dom would like it, and he knew that because he remembered what kinds of pictures Dom liked and what movies made him make faces. Sometimes Dom made this blank still face--only rarely, and certain times, like lying on the couch in their hobbit-house in New Zealand once when the wind was whistling on the windows--and Lijah knew that it meant he was homesick. He knew automatically what would make Dom angry and why and if Orli told him that Dom had not apologized for something he knew that it was because Dom's feelings wouldn't have been hurt, so he didn't think the new makeup girl's would be either. He knew, when Dom stayed gone and stayed gone and stayed gone some more, that it wasn't because he forgot.

There was no question that getting Dom to do what Lij wanted was easy. Lij was sick, even if only because he'd made himself that way sweating and brooding and not eating over Dom. Then it was Lij's house, and Dom wasn't too happy with driving on the right side of the street, and he was friendly and sweet, and basically, if you wanted it you only ever had to ask when he couldn't guess what it was before you got around to it. Unless, of course, he thought it would be funny to tease you, but who minded that, with Dom's round little nose above a tremendous crooked smile, too large for his cheeks?

If he whined and begged, he could get an antsy Dom--and he knew this even though he hadn't done it yet in almost a week of being sick--to sit in bed with him, but wouldn't it be the I'm Sitting In Bed kind of sitting then, the kind you do to answer the question _will you do this for me?_ And Elijah didn't want that. He was willing to ask Dom, yes, he thought in the middle of the night, alone in Dom's bed while Dom slept in Elijah's across the hall, pushing his face further under the pillow, seeking out Dom's scent in the crevices of the bed.

When you can't get it any other way, you ask; but he didn't want what Dom wouldn't _give._

Which was why he devoted so much attention to it: it had to be perfectly, utterly casual. First there was pretending to be bored, and of course he had to sit through some books and part of the newspaper in preliminary attempts to solve the problem before Dom would bring in the TV.

And even then it took hours before Dom was on the bed with him watching it.

Finally. Re-runs of _Friends_ on TV, because it was on, and a loose cocoon of blankets peeling back around them, as it wasn't particularly cold in the room, and Dom next to him and their arms touching even before Lijah got tired and let himself slump over against the thick solid cording of Dom's arm.

There's only so long you can watch Dom eat without getting accidentally hypnotized. Luckily, for the sick week, Elijah didn't really have anywhere else to go, and Dom didn't have much to do other than watch TV. Actually, Dom _never_ had much to do, he mused--he was the one who had to adjust to the change in lying in bed all day. Not that he minded, of course, lounging against the headboard in a nest of blankets that smelled of Dom still, even if not as much, and watching Dom rather than the TV set.

By the time three days had passed, Elijah thought he might even be getting worse from never moving--the days growing long and surreal and nothing to do but think, and think, and dream--and oh, the dreams. But Dom, perched in the blankets next to him with his eyes fixed perfectly on the TV with utter concentration, had cotton boxers riding up his thighs over a dusting of sandy curls that were making Lij's mouth water more than the crisp crunch of white teeth in the white flesh of the apple and the sticky trickle at the corner of Dom's ripe lips.

His mouth was never _quite_ closed, and there was always the red shadow of it on his lower lip and in its corners, and his mouth wrapped so gracefully around the apple, his tongue flicking out to catch juice, and when he sucked his thumb clean, still without looking away from the TV, Elijah was starting to feel light-headed. He knew there was something he should have been thinking about other than Dom's mouth, and that there were a million reasons for--things, but for now all he could hold on to was a "no" with sharp cutting little edges. He clung stubbornly, and wanted, and watched, and tried very, very hard not to blink.

There was a sort of lurking consciousness of crying, waiting to happen. He had cried over Dom before, though not quite in that manner, not in front of Dom, and certainly not when there were so... oh... much better things to look at, like Dom, licking his lips, and the little tip of his nose and his eyes when he blinked. And his mouth. What about his mouth? Ummmmm. So no matter how odd it was--he felt a bit like a bubble or a balloon stretched too big, too thin, too fast, trembling and uncertain and confused--he couldn't quite cry, because there was too much of Dom to drink up, to lap up. A feast of him, succulent to the last morselish bit, and this kind of thinking was starting to make his eyes glaze over. Ohhhh, eating, the apple in Dom's hand, sticky and glistening sugared lips. And Dom himself, sticky and glistening. Elijah couldn't decide which piece he'd like to devour first. When _he_ was done licking there wouldn't be a drop of salt or sugar to glisten on his mouth.

Blink. Refocus. "Lijah? Liiiiiiijah?" Dom was glancing at him, his sticky mouth all twisted up at the corner, crooked and amused. Elijah almost panted. "You're really no' paying attention at all, ya tosser."

"Sorry."

Dom just grinned and turned back to the TV, but in a minute--right after Elijah had gone back to mentally undressing him, right, of course--he said, "We can turn the TV off?"

"No," Lij stammered, "uh, no. I'm fine."

"Okay," said Dom doubtfully: "You don't wanna sleep or anything?"

"I'm not _that_ sick," Elijah said. Maybe not that sick, but he was still, evidently and unfortunately, just sick enough to make him incapable of thinking of more than one thing at once. When Dom licked his lips a minute later Lij was still watching him, and discovered, at once, that his mouth was dry.

And then _said_ it.

D'oh.

"You're supposed to be drinking a lot," said Dom, his brows snapping scruffily together over his round nose and his uneven pink mouth. The unfortunate part came when he got up and left, and Lij somehow managed to fall asleep while he was gone.

When he woke up, Dom was sitting in a chair by the window reading a book, and there was a glass of water on the table. Lij eyed it doubtfully, but when he caught Dom's eyes on him he downed it all in a few gulps and managed a wan smile.

Time had stretched out with his sickness, and he'd spent so much time in Dom's bed in the guest room that he remembered the stuff before it mostly in a foggy haze. As though Dom had always been at his house, and that was a mistake, he knew, because part of him believed that things that have always been will always be, and Dom wasn't going to always stay; Dom was British, and Dom, unlike Elijah, wasn't utterly obsessively devoted. It was all impossible.

The impossibility was funny, putting itself up in front of him--maybe down the middle of him--like a sheet of thick wavy glass. Sometimes Lij thought there were two universes for him, the one where he ought to fall in love with Dom but he never would, never could, because, just because. It was impossible. --And then the other one where it was too late because he'd fallen in love already a long time ago.

And now Elijah had a foot, as it were, in each of them. _As it were_: what a Dom thing to say. He'd say that on the phone and then send a text message and somehow manage to misspell "hi," or his own name, or possibly both.

Dom had been living in Elijah's LA house now for the scant eternity of three weeks, counting all the sick time, which Elijah counted as pretty much over even though Dom didn't believe it. It was Thursday now, Thursday afternoon, and Dom had shown up on Saturday morning, so it was close enough. Elijah remembered the day Dom had come because he had not known until that Friday that Dom was coming, and that Wednesday (and, yes, Wednesday, because he had been having lunch and that had been the soup of the day) he had gone for a drive and ended up a lot further from Hollywood than he'd thought he was going to, someplace where you'll suffocate if you stay in your car another second. He'd got out and scuffed his feet across a brown-dust-white-gravel patch of ground with the grass worn away, rocks, hills. A dusting of hills and a panorama of after-midday-but-not-night sky. A drifting, slow lowering of dusk like a veil over all of it, light gossamer, a blush of indigo on the blue.

It had been so, so pretty, too fucking gorgeous for words or thoughts, with the grass turning blue and turquoise from the light reflecting off of it, but only if you stared for long enough.

Sometimes something just takes your breath away so you don't even _want_ to move or speak for a while--that had happened a lot in New Zealand, really, and a lot more since then, as if he'd learned how or something.

And when you do want to think again, you wish you hadn't thought at all, because the first fucking thing that comes to your mind is _I want to kiss him here_ and the second thing is _sometime. Who knows, sometime I might be able to--_ and then you want to scrub your brain out with a wire brush, because once you have that thought, it's too late to make it go away.

Now that Dom was there Elijah tried not to think about that place--another on the list of no-Dom things, along with excessive amounts of alcohol (what would he say?) and whipped cream (a fantasy that he was afraid would still make him blush, but _God_, it had been hot, and he might never eat it again without shivers of heat). He could not take Dom there, now, because the image was so firm in his mind of Dom's arms closing around him tightly and his mouth pushing down and opening on Elijah's. Who knew what he would do?

* * *

In the end, it turned out to be the thought of the kiss itself and not the thought of the location that was most dangerous. Of course, without the alcohol, it probably would have been fine, but just after Lij had graduated to the living room couch, Dom wandered in with a sweating beer and said, "You should be drinking--have some beer," and offered it without thinking.

Elijah had swiped at it.

It had been visible on Dom's face when he remembered, and he said, "Uh! No, water, have some water," and snatched his hand back.

"No, c'mon," he'd whined. Beer. He wanted beer. And to feel like a grown-up. (Hence the whining.)

Dom had looked doubtful.

"You know I'm not sick any more," Lij had said. "You know, fuck it, I'll get my own." He'd been mad enough, too. That was probably why Dom had given in.

Getting drunk and drinking aren't quite the same. Elijah didn't mean to get drunk, and Dom probably hadn't wanted him to either; but nonetheless, it had happened.

It had taken him a little while to twig to it that he was tipsy--not totally gone, of course, just a little, uh--tipsy. Right. Just tipsy enough to stare at nothing but Dom like someone under a spell after half an hour or so, and then to suggest a drinking game. Riiiiiight. So there they were, watching Elijah's video of a cast party and drinking at all the inside jokes, and then--oh! imagine that--there was Dom.

Dom. His pretty open mouth, wet with beer, and the smell of his breath, and his neck, kinda sweaty, even, sticking out of the rumpled collar of a shirt. Dom was _always_ rumpled. It looked right. It made Elijah horny as hell--but maybe, that drunk, it didn't matter what Dom looked like for him to feel this way.

Dom _much_ closer than he'd been a minute ago. Maybe that was Elijah's fault and maybe not. Who cared.

He licked his lips and looked at Dom's shirt where it touched his neck in the middle, the unfastened top button. And before he knew it, he was saying "Can I lick you?" And he was even closer than he'd been before.

A startled, charming little jerk. Surprised. Why was he surprised? "Unh," said Dom, his eyes as round as, as something really fucking _round._

Oh. Maybe, because Dom was moving back. Yeah. No. And he'd known there was something he was forgetting, and that must have been it: he wasn't supposed to lick Dom: Lij nodded to himself. Yes, he remembered now, because it was impossible, and that was unfair.

He wasn't sure, later, how much of that he said out loud, but however much it was, a moment later he was looking down stupidly at Dom's hand around his wrist.

"No--Wait! Lijah. Unh. Please do--"

And so he did: he leaned close to smell and taste the hot salt of Dom's neck and feel the prickle of that roguish beard on his tongue. Why hadn't he done that before, he thought fuzzily. His brain popped and fizzed around the edges, beer or Dom, he couldn't t--

Ah. His pants had been really too tight, for a minute, there, until he figured out where to put his legs (on the sides of Dom's), and sat down in Dom's lap, and there were--mm--a pair of square warm hands sliding inside his jeans on his ass. Elijah wriggled, a little, the bulky seam of the denim pressing against his crotch teasingly. Dom took pity on him and somehow managed to undo the zip and get Elijah's face turned up to kiss his mouth (finally!) at the same time.

Mmm. Elijah let his mouth come open too fast, maybe. He had a feeling his kisses were too fast and clumsy. They felt wet and sloppy, like he didn't know how to, which he did, really. He hadn't kissed enough, maybe. He had never wanted to this much, though, even though he, uhm, liked it, and it was very very nice of course.

Dom, on the other hand, wetness aside (well, kisses were supposed to be wet) clearly did know how. He was pretty damn good at it, in fact. Pretty fucking fantastic, Elijah thought, opening his mouth a little more and twisting pitifully on Dom's lap, grinding closer, his ass against Dom's erection trapped in his sweatpants. Dom gasped and laughed at the same time, and Lij thought of biting his lip then, so he did, bit it hard, scraped over it and worried it with his teeth and sucked on just the tip of Dom's tongue while Dom moaned and made feeble closing motions of his hands on Elijah's hips.

Through his drunkenness--or tipsiness--came a last gasping thought, a sudden floundering thread of sanity. "We can't," he whispered with his mouth moving over Dom's, his lips pulling over them, catching damp and longing on the swell of Dom's lower lip.

Dom didn't seem offended, just gripped Elijah's hips firmly and pulled him closer. "Too late, innit," he whispered back matter-of-factly, and twisted his hips up from the floor with a little arch. Elijah's mind whited out, and okay, yes, it was too late. There might have been some stopping before, before the drinking, or at least before the cuddling--before the sickness? Um.

But now, no.

He thought about the bed, but it would have taken too long to say "Do you want to--" whatever, and even longer to get up and go there. Instead he knelt up and scrambled backward and sideways, sort of, onto the edge of the couch, closing his hand awkwardly on Dom's shoulder, just like, he thought later, he didn't know how to speak English and say just _Come here_ even if he couldn't think of anything clever and urbane like _I never thought I'd be a top_ as he lay down shivering on his back, but it didn't matter, because he opened his legs anyway when Dom went to lie on top of him and closed them satisfyingly around Dom's hips and clutched them tight, there, curling his waist and pressing the small of his back down and curving his ass up, trying to rub his aching cock on Dom or get just some pressure, some sensation, some relief.

"Let's get these--" Dom said, pushing at the denim so the waistband scraped Elijah's thighs, with a voice as concentratedly British and generally hot as fuck and sexily unsure as all of Dom, with maybe a little tremble in it.

"Fuck," Elijah said, and then "Fuck" again, because they could _not_ get the damn pants off him without him unwrapping his legs. He let Dom push/tug them off, not being really very helpful at all.

Sex on the couch. Haha, they were really going to do it. Not that it was funny so much as unbelievably hot. Sex at all, really, was--he couldn't imagine a universe in which he'd have the strength to say no to Dom levered above him on his elbows with his lips scraped up and his brows beetled together with his sweatpants tenting over the jut of his cock before Elijah pushed them down, partly with his hands, partly by clamping his thighs around Dom and pushing with an odd wriggling motion that also, incidentally, made Dom growl and bite his neck. Which. Ohhhh, yes.

And then there was nothing between them, and when Dom let his full weight down it was like he was swallowed in it, sweat-slick skin and the smell of his leather couch and the burning length of Dom's dick on his stomach, hard and hot and eager. Lij whimpered and tried writhing again, as that had seemed so successful before--maybe, if he was lucky, he wouldn't have to say anything, or ask. _Fuck me._ It sounded hot in his head, but he'd rather just keep his mouth occupied sucking Dom's tongue rhythmically into and out of it, thank you.

He didn't know it, at first, when they'd started thrusting--the frustration penetrated first, because his lust-fogged brain couldn't fail to notice how they slipped and slid and couldn't get good purchase. Elijah put a hand between them, tentative on the living velvet leaping eagerly against his fingertips. He tried wrapping his hand around them both and Dom made a choking noise and pushed down, crushing him in the couch and maybe bruising his fingers. But little sparks were flying behind his eyes, because it'd got his cock too.

Elijah had to moan--he was always vocal, of course, not just with sex, not that that mattered. But he could hardly stop himself, so it didn't matter. He didn't do that on purpose, although certainly, the slick little lithe twists he gave, spreading his legs further apart and grunting a little. Of course that was on purpose. He was half-mad before he felt calluses on Dom's thumbs snagging the too-smooth skin on the inside of his thigh, high up near the crease of it, trailing backward, where Elijah felt dizzy desire making his pulse pound. If every nerve end in his body had moved to his ass he couldn't have felt more the diffident brushes of Dom's fingers.

He gave up on not asking all at once and entirely bypassed the _asking_ in favor of demanding hoarsely "forGOD'SsakeDom_fuckme_." He was entirely willing, furthermore, to fuck himself, if Dom'd give him more than one finger (fresh from Dom's flushed mouth--wasn't _that_ something to look at) to work with. He could do _this_ well on his own, and had, more than once, sweating and naked alone in his bed with tears on his face and "Dom" on his lips. Better if Dom did it, though, so he made the first soft noises he could think of--more a matter of not being able to stop, again, than any clever plan--and thrust his hips down on the damp digit, twisting.

"Fucking HELL yes, Lijah," breathed Dom in that broken way that made Lij think every dirty thing at once that had ever made him blush. He made another little inquiring sound--beyond words, now, but he thought it meant something like _pleasewouldyoufuckmeNOW?_

Yes, Dom would--after the slow invasion of a second finger, pressing and seeking for so. goddamned. long. you'd think he didn't know where Elijah's fucking prostate _was_, and wasn't that enough of that, now, for God's sake. "_Fuck_ you," Elijah exclaimed, and he would have said "tosser" back, but under the circumstances it was maybe too funny.

And Dom was grinning ferally down at him and saying raspily over his mouth, "But I'd rather fuck you." And oh shit. Yes. That was his stomach evaporating or melting away, entirely. Hi. Elijah Wood, from _The Lord of the Rings,_ I look like a girl and I beg for it--ah. Dom's dick, flushed rose and dark in a nest of curls, jutting toward Elijah, jumping when he circled the head with his forefinger to the sound of Dom's breath hissing between his teeth. Then he dove in at once for a kiss that was more like a fucking bite. Just eat me up, Elijah thought, wildly but not at all reproachfully. Dom could nibble on his lip all he wanted, bite his tongue, push him apart with hot licking, lascivious and melting slow and wet. And Elijah licked Dom's hand when it was presented, as carefully as he could that fast. Maybe too eagerly, but he was beyond noticing and Dom was beyond caring. Dom slicked himself with the spit--hm. Somehow you never think about that bit when you think about sex on the couch, spit and Dom's grip slipping, and his fingernails biting into your hips. The second that stretched out _forever_ with the blunt head of his cock, maybe too big, prodding between Lijah's legs, slipping against the crack of his ass--the pressure of it, thick and hot and tantalizing, against the opening while Lijah arched up and gasped before it slipped again, Dom still holding back.

"Over," he gasped. So Elijah flipped over, or rather, Dom flipped him over and he went, spreading his legs apart for Dom to settle between, his knees pushing up, his ass in the air. Biting the couch cushion, which tasted like leather and smelled like sex, or maybe that was the whole room. _Fuck._

"Baby," Dom might have muttered, but that was about the point where his grip on Elijah's hip steadied, one-handed because the other must have been guiding his cock because that time there was a more even resistance in the circle of muscle, tense and then a slick give, the blunt head slipping past in fiery little infinitesimal increments. Then Dom, God knew howthefuck how, _paused_ for half a second, which was a whole second longer than Elijah could wait to have that lip-biting stretching whisper of flame a little higher, a little deeper, where he felt a screaming gnawing need. He pushed back, pushed again, rocking, and felt Dom involuntarily take the rhythm. He arched his back, and Dom's hands were wrapping firmly around his hips and pulling his ass higher, Elijah's arms folded under his forehead, but they could have lost all their blood for all he cared. The angle changed, with that little movement, and when Elijah slid obligingly into the movement Dom's next thrust went almost, it felt, all the way, setting alive sparks where he didn't know he had nerves, but _now_ he was going to scream if he didn't get another--or gasp. Or. Cry. Meanwhile the burning damp stretch of it all was shorting out circuits in his brain, snarling the nice orderly melted slag of his stomach into a nasty confusion of coils again.

He might have bitten his own arm at this point, um, hard enough to draw blood, what with the incredible thick tight heat of it, the force, the rough excruciating power behind the pleasure with Dom squeezing too hard at his hips, biting the back of his neck. "Lij-_uh_," Dom grunted, pulling back so slowly that Lij burned and moaned with the painful damning emptiness.

"_Faster,_ you fucking--" He got another sharp nip on his shoulder and a throaty laugh for his trouble, but then, oh, yesss, the punishing even push of another deep stroke, and if Elijah arched his back in the middle it scraped against his prostate at a new angle. His mouth was open with some kind of crazy noise coming out.

More grunts, Dom's thighs slapping stickily with sweat on Elijah's ass, the unsynchronized dirty choreography, pushing and pulling and harsh prickly tenderness and each thrust, he thought--he imagined, but no, he _knew_\--a little deeper and still never deep--enough--

Dom chuckled and whispered, "Do you want--" a little incoherent, maybe, Lij thought smugly, because he broke off there and seemed to forget he meant to say anything at all, when Lij rolled his hips up into the next thrust with a loose-vibrating moan that clawed up the inside of his chest. And that, it seemed, was Dom's clue to lose control. Elijah's neck went damply spongy, his head insupportable, sweat rolling off him and not cooling fast enough and his couch was going to be almost as thoroughly fucked as he was. There were only a few more very deliberate, very fast thrusts--the third also very deep, as Elijah, on a flash of inspiration, spread his legs a bit further apart--before he was gasping, his eyes closing involuntarily and a fresh wash of blood flooding his face and neck, trembling as his spine went to liquid sparks and his stomach seemed to turn inside out, hot and cold and tight, unravelling with the fierce wickedness of an orgasm that closed his throat.

He didn't want it to ever end, and the aftershocks were still making his muscles clench lazily as Dom, his breath a hot audible gust on the nape of Lij's neck, thrust emphatically in again with a hard short flex of his hips and withdrew just as quickly. Again, and... mmm, oh, another languid shiver unfurling like feathery fingernails up his back, making him shiver all over, making his knees suddenly uncertain while his body, now soft and welcoming, closed around Dom again and clutched him close. Lij pressed back, a little, desultory with still hot pleasure, at the deep point of the thrust, and said a long string of "Mmm"s; Dom whimpered and came, pressing close, biting at Lij's neck, pulsing hot and wet and deep.

They collapsed together on the sexy sweaty smelly couch, drunk and limp and boneless and (in Elijah's case) in some previously unimagined form of Heaven.

When they woke up, he had a vague knowledge a few minutes later as Dom withdrew and they curled up together gingerly, it was going to be just as smelly and even stickier. But that didn't by any means make him want to move, because there would be something satisfyingly real about waking up glued to the couch with your come and Dom's slender-shaped blunt-fingered hand on your stomach, nestled peaceably together. And there was definitely, he decided fiercely with the force of determined pretence, something _much_ better about cuddling after the hottest sex of your life when that was the consummation of a thick stormy passionate mutual infatuation than when it was a steamy buddy-fuck. He closed his eyes and cuddled, and when Dom's hand settled on his collarbone, he bent his head to kiss the back of it.


	2. Taste of Want

After that it was more a matter of how to stop than how to continue--not that Elijah wanted to stop, but Dom didn't really seem to either, and they were just as casual about it as Elijah's worst nightmare could have conjured. It was more work to sleep companionably curled around Dom than companionably in the next room, more work to say "fuck me" when he wanted to say "you do know, don't you, that you're beautiful?" than to say nothing at all. And it wasn't _cold,_ this casualness, because they had never been cold. There was no reason to completely eliminate tenderness--no reason except that it might have been safer. Sometimes he was terrified. Or, no, almost all the time, of one thing or another. He made fun of himself in the morning, in front of the mirror, brushing his teeth: oh look, Elijah, ohmiGOD, another love bite. I'll never wash my cheek again. And the worst part was that even though he did wash his cheek, of course--he couldn't tear his eyes from it, and his hand might have trembled when he cupped it over the marred skin.

Elijah was reading the newspaper at the kitchen table one afternoon, having just recently got out of bed, already dressed and idly wondering if he felt up to making food, and whether coffee would be enough breakfast before he went to meet with his agent. The click of the door made all his nerves stretch taut, even though he didn't turn to watch--huh, funny he hadn't quite known before that he was only waiting. Finally, of course, he did turn his head, right before Dom came close, slapped his ass and ruffled his hair. "Got recognized in the store," he said, pulling milk out of a bag: ah, yes. They had been out. Evidently driving on the right was getting easier. Well, he had been around more than a month.

"Oooooh," said Elijah, reaching for the milk and taking it out of Dom's hand with utter nonchalance. He poured a glass, and continued, "more fans of _Hetty Wainthrop Investigates._"

Dom snatched the milk back. "Yes, and right after the hordes of those had finished with me, I met with a few more proposals of marriage--" Lij snorted; Dom grinned, "--for you." Oh. Damn. Dom was just looking at him, trying not to smile. "Go ahead. Pout."

Lij took a drink of milk instead. It took him that long to figure out what to say. "The only problem," he said, "is choosing between all the attractive offers. Don't even tell me about these. I mean, I could have my pick of fourteen year olds, sixteen year olds..."

"Fifteen year olds," said Dom helpfully. "Thirteen year olds. Even some twenty-somethings, I bet, but you'd have to grow into them..."

Elijah wisely ignored the interruption and mourned, looking at his fingers on the milk-fogged glass, "And they all have so much to offer, too. If only I were the decision-making type, but as it is, I--I'm just stuck. I'm doomed to remain a bachelor."

"Doomed," Dom agreed solemnly. A short, morose silence pervaded the room until Dom broke in again, much more brightly: "Unless, of course, you want to marry me!" No pause could have been long enough to allow that to _properly_ sink in. "--Of course, you'd have to be the one in the dress..."

"Of course," said Elijah smoothly, over the absurd little lurch of his heart at the thought. Not, of course, of the dress (...), but of the wedding itself: and a _wedding_. what was wrong with him? In love, yes. Fourteen year old girl, no.

Hopefully.

"You might look good in a dress." Dom's look had gone speculative, one eyebrow quirking and his eyelids lowering a bit. "In fact..." a pink tongue darted out to lave his lips, and. Oops. Elijah was _blushing._ Okay. Fourteen year old girl. Dom, can I have your babies? He was thinking, just now, that any amount of pain might be worth it, uh, in a not-real, um, metaphorical, er, figurative sense. Right. Not that he particularly liked pain, although he was very much into the shoulder-biting thing.

Which, come to think of it, he might be able to negotiate. He turned and leaned against the table, braced his feet apart. "In fact?" He prompted, with a look of invitation.

Dom grinned. "You're a pretty girl."

"I think I might have heard that somewhere before."

"You mean I don't get points for originality?" He sounded wounded.

Elijah grinned and spread his legs further. "Well... maybe you can make it up to me."

A pause in which Elijah must have flushed from the tips of his toes to the top of his head in the wake of Dom's eyes, burning hot and wandering all over him. He might or might not have started biting his lip at that point, but he didn't drop his eyes. The burning flush, the arousal masquerading as uncertainty in those moments when Dom stared him down like that--that was getting to be, more and more, what he lived for, which was its own can of worms that he did not care to open, thank you very much, immediately prior to pre-breakfast sex on the kitchen table. Dom smiled a bit wider and said mildly, "You're so confident. What if you weren't the prettiest little thing ever and I suddenly gained the ability to resist you?"

And of course he knew that was teasing, but God. Could Dom pick anything to say that would make him hotter (well, other than the shameless kind of sex talk they'd only managed once or twice on the phone without collapsing in embarrasment/laughter)? "That might suck," Elijah managed, lifting one leg to prop his foot on the edge of a kitchen chair. Aha, that was Dom's eyes following the line of his thigh.

"Might," said Dom absently, stepping closer into the wide V of his legs. "But it doesn't look like 's gonna be a problem t'day..." His words got slurrier, and Britisher, when he was turned on. Elijah's spine was going liquid, and he had enough presence of mind to lean forward to claim a kiss faster, close-mouthed and long and almost still, at first, to let the unexpected little thrill of it spread out and settle down before Dom pushed all the way close and his legs went around Dom's hips. Mmmmmm.

"So good," he muttered, with a little nibble, tonguing the point of one of Dom's canines.

"Mmmmm," said Dom, enunciating Elijah's exact thoughts. Amazing, how they were on the same wavelength, Elijah thought a little hysterically, because it wasn't really funny, or rather, it was but it shouldn't have been, when you were talking about sex, but there were other ways that it wasn't funny because they scared him half to death. Like the way he paced around the house like a caged tiger with a tremendous appetite for tiger fingernails, er, claws, whenever Dom was gone--like when he went back to England for a few days and it took Lij way too long to realize his fingers were bleeding. Good thing blood wasn't, like, poisonous or something. Or the way if Dom went to bed early, all of a sudden, Elijah was ready for bed, not even because he wanted to fuck or steal cuddles or watch Dom sleep (or d, all of the above), but because he couldn't think of anything else he'd rather do, as if there were no _point_ when Dom wasn't there. And, really, even if they did get married. Well, you know. Figuratively, get married--if they were together, some time, and ancient geezers, you had to assume he would get over that, because that was pretty fucked-up-edly codependent behavior for any kind of couple.

This, he thought hazily, groping at Dom's delicious firm ass through stiff dark jeans, was not Romeo and Juliet, and Elijah was not a twelve-year-old girl or even a twenty-one-year old girl, and had not spent his whole entire life reading trashy romance novels about girls with blond hair and the Big Men who rescued them from pirates and shit. Whatever it might seem like.

It wasn't really possible for there to be a person he _couldn't_ get enough of, was there? No. So he would just wait, and they would fuck, and he would cry to himself in the bathroom in the middle of the night because he couldn't do it in bed any more, and maybe eventually he'd reach his limit of Dom, probably.

Meanwhile, they were living together, going to awards shows and the grocery store together, cooking dinner together sometimes, in the kind of way that would have been perfect enough to sicken other people if only it weren't for the eensy little unrequited-love factor. Which Elijah wasn't thinking about as he thrust his hands under the waistband of Dom's jeans and scooted forward to the edge of the table, and then _really_ wasn't thinking about when Dom's hand found its way inside his boxers and a cool, slim finger slid without preamble into his ass. The tensing was only an instant long, now, eyes closed mouth open knees clutching around Dom's waist, soft rippling relaxation as blood rushed downwards with shocking suddenness. They didn't have any lube in the room; maybe it was the urgency that was making "rough" sound so appealing all of a sudden, or maybe it went the other way, if that made any sense. Maybe not.

Ah, well. Elijah concentrated, instead, on getting Dom's jeans unbuttoned. Normally this might not have required much effort, but considering his shaking fumbling fingers and the things Dom was panting in his ear, it was amazing they managed at all.

"Lube?" Dom muttered, just like he didn't know the answer. Elijah squirmed and kicked his boxers off before wrapping his legs around Dom's waist again, breathing harshly.

"How about any fucking way at all as long as you do it _now_," he said, and Dom's hands were on his hips already, just waiting for permission. He was strong enough to brace his thighs on the edge of the table and pick Elijah up by his hips, and hold him there long enough to lower him carefully, with exquisite aim, onto Dom's cock.

Ahhhh. When Elijah's brain stopped whiting out, he realized Dom's hands were supporting most of his weight, kneading his ass absently, and they were standing a little apart from the table, no, moving, and _fuck_, if they fell--but no, they staggered drunkenly, kissing and laughing and Elijah clutching his muscles tight along the length of Dom buried still inside him--and ended up only banging Dom's hip on the counter before they slammed into the wall. Lijah might have ended up seeing stars from that, but he was already a little disconnected from reality. He'd bit his lip hard enough to start bleeding at some point, oh, look at that! Something else to angst about in the middle of the night.

The middle of the night is a good time for angst if you're into metaphysical metaphors, when your brain is more likely to accept the profound similarity between the physical pain of biting your lip and the psychological pain of buddy-fucking the cutest little charming steamy-hot ball of British sex to ever walk on two feet. (And when you taste _blood_ the taste is the _bitter yet sweet_ sensation coming from the _self-inflicted wound_ of... huh. Maybe he should return to this metaphor in the middle of the night, when he'd be able to bullshit through it with no trouble and convince himself completely while he was at it. Because, of course, he needed more self-pity to wallow in. Yes. Smallest violin in the world, here, playing a lament for poor little me....)

"You know," Lij found voice to pant breathlessly in the general direction of the ceiling, his back flat on the wall, Dom's fingers biting into his naked hips, another sharp shallow thrust from Dom making his toes curl so hard they almost cramped, "--you're pretty good at this."

"A natural," Dom growled, and took the edge of Lij's ear between his teeth while his mouth was over there anyway.

Another thrust, and Dom lost some grip so Elijah slid down with a little jolt. They both stopped breathing for a second, Dom shuddering with the effort to keep control, Elijah slickly undulating a little, breathless wanton wiggles, tilting his hips and trying and failing to grind closer. Fuck it, Dom, _come_ already, I want to--ah. The last inner clench did it, Dom burying his face helplessly in Lijah's neck, his body starting to go limp. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to collapse in a sweaty heap with Dom on the kitchen floor. It would make something else to angst about, and if he told Sean about it (which he occasionally did, and Sean tried very, very hard to be sympathetic and not act shocked no matter how shocked he was), then that should be yet another source of amusement. But, no: there was Dom's orgasm, and a few shallow thrusts, and Dom didn't even have to touch Elijah again before he was coming too, a hot shivery one that swept up over him and turned him thick and liquid, utterly destroyed, in its wake. Shit, Dom. _Shit._ Was he just an incredible lay (well, like, a REALLY incredible one), or was Elijah such a mushball that he went all melty deeply moved by sex with his One True Soulmate?

Wait.

"Okay," he hissed on his cell to Sean that night, when Dom was asleep inside, "when did he go from my pitiful adolescent crush to my pitiful burning unrequited love to my One True Soulmate?"

There was a little silence.

"Sean?"

"I'm thinking. I mean--"

"You're not supposed to think. You're just supposed to make me feel better."

Sean sounded exasperated. "What did you think I was thinking _about_?"

Elijah snorted. "For future reference, try something like 'Yes, you're exactly right. Poor baby.'"

Sean laughed instead of taking the whining at all seriously, which was probably just as well, even though Lij was at least half serious. "Poor baby. Maybe it was around the time you started having sex on a regular basis? Just an idea."

Lij groaned and buried his face in his hands. "You're supposed to be _helping,_ asshole."

"Lij, I'm really sorry," said Sean with his patented switch from Teasing Big Brother to Concerned Big Brother, "and I wish I could help you better, but all I can do is try to give you advice and tell you what I think, and you know I'm pulling it out of my ass. And I really can't" an exasperated sigh, and he broke off and started over, "It's just that I don't really know about this. I don't think it's a good idea to take what you think you can get. You deserve--everything. And I don't think you should give up on Dom. Why don't you just _talk_ to him?"

"Gee, thanks," said Elijah sarcastically, fumbling for a cigarette. "I never thought of that."

* * *

Of course Elijah had been lying--he thought about it constantly, all the fucking _time._ He'd imagined it so many ways he couldn't remember them all anymore. He thought about it before Dom arrived, thought about it so much when Dom was first there, running into and out of the house with crazy filming and errands he kept making for himself, that he didn't eat and drink, essentially, for weeks, and made himself so sick he collapsed. You can live without Dom a _bit_ more easily than you can live without water and nutrients.

It was living _with_ Dom that was the problem.

Right after the sickness, for a while he was drinking more than enough, and for a while after that, enough, almost entirely by himself. Well, for a week or so anyway. Well, alright, maybe he wouldn't have at all if not for Dom hovering and reminding him, coming to find him with glasses of orange juice and iced tea and water.

He only actually managed 8 glasses one day--people weren't _meant_ to drink that much. He didn't have enough time to go to the bathroom that often.

And now Dom was still reminding him all the time, but he was getting so used to it he was in danger of forgetting and getting sick again. "Water," Dom said, lifting his face from the pillow on Lij's bed (larger than the guest bed and somehow not so forbidding, when you weren't alone in it) and poking with bare toes at Elijah's thigh. Easy to catch the foot, grinning and looking down so Dom wouldn't see whatever silly things his face was doing, and bend over to press a kiss to the back of the slim tanned thigh emerging from the edge of the sheet. His hand skated up under the light cotton, over the sweet curve of Dom's ass. Dom grinned, sleepy-eyed, like sex incarnate with his hair all over the place and the marks of his teeth fresh on Elijah's shoulder under the shirt he was wearing.

Elijah swallowed with difficulty. "Right," he said, "Water," not even listening to himself. "I'll be back--soon." But not soon enough for him. He wanted to bury his face and his hands in Dom's neck and his hair and the smell of him, and his cock, twitching impatiently against his thigh, thought wrapping himself up in Dom and a lot of blankets and being fucked back into oblivion was the best offer he was likely to get all day.

He left. Elijah drove too fast with the window down, sunglasses on and a cigarette between his fingers, no music in the car but the keening of the wind. In his dream he'd been walking an intricate pattern on the beach for Dom to follow, with the water washing his footprints away while he cried and the waves numbed his toes. He was carrying white rose petals, and his fingers were bleeding, and he never dropped a petal that wasn't stained with at least a smudge, a bright kiss, of red. They littered his path, but he didn't look back; it didn't seem to matter, or perhaps he was afraid to let himself think that it might, any more of the thought, that is, than it took to keep dropping the petals--even though it made his fingers bleed and he was getting dizzy.

That day driving home with a cup of McDonald's drive-thru coffee cradled awkwardly in one hand, Lijah was next to another car at a stop light with its windows down, blasting Missy Elliot so loudly it gave him a headache in (yes, he counted) five seconds, and he had to roll his window up. Strains of noise oozed across the windshield and made it through the passenger window, along with a breeze ruffling the pages of the book Dom had been trying to get him to read for the past month. Elijah looked back out his own window at the pale girls in the other car with their dark glasses, or at least, through them, past them in their general direction, not seeing. He thought he should talk to Sean again, with the part of his mind that wasn't planning the fastest way to get out of his clothes and deciding whether he was going to drag Dom into the bedroom for long and slow right away, or blow him in the living room on the floor fast and hard first and save, for later, the long and slow and sweet, God, sweet as fuck and the little space between Dom's lips when he was listening very hard.

In the end, his body made the decision for him. Lij was a bottoming-from-the-top kind of guy, but he really hadn't wanted to leave that morning and his hands and his mouth and, of course, his cock, were so happy to find out Dom was still there when they got back that they couldn't control themselves. And who wanted to, with Dom's hair against his lips? Not Elijah. Dom's hands started resting on his waist, but he was shocked, Elijah could see, at the speed of thrusts that wrung little helpless open-mouthed cries from both of them at once, right away. Dom's hands tightened because he couldn't help it, digging into Elijah's pale thin-skinned hipbones, and Lij hoped hoped hoped it would bruise so he could touch the marks in the shower and feel them in bed tonight, when it was too black to see them.

Dom slept, and for a while Lijah lay half-draped over his back with his lips on one powerful exquisite slope of shoulderblade. As casually as possible, of course. They'd long ago kicked the blankets and sheets out of reach, and now even the sun falling on them wasn't keeping him entirely warm as the sweat cooled, so he got up, dragged the sheet over Dom, went to the window. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack on the nightstand and stood naked with his forehead on the cold glass pane, looking out at his backyard with only the occasional glance sideways at the swell of Dom's bicep, the curve of his cheek.

Of course he wouldn't light the cig in the bedroom.

He didn't light it at all, actually.

When he turned on the computer there was a long e-mail from Sean, which he'd learned to look for after the kind of conversation they'd had. And by long, woo, yeah. _If I thought he knew what he was doing to you I'd be angrier with him,_ it said. And then, _But then I ask myself if you know what you're doing to him. Think about it, Elijah._ Yeah, asshole, that would be so useful if he knew what Dom thought about it all. Felt. Felt about it all was probably what he meant, for this weird warm cocktail of confused emotion. And then if he _did_ know, of course he would not have thought twice about it. Fuck.

He wasn't being fair, though, even if it didn't make sense, because it probably would in the end, and maybe it didn't now because he didn't want it to. Right. The computer chair swiveled and creaked; it wouldn't stay still as long as he didn't, and he, of course, couldn't. Elijah ran a distracted hand through his hair and kept reading too fast, skimming, but he would reread it. It was hard to finish a whole email about Dom just after sex, dressed in his boxers, still post-coitally lazy, without spacing out. It wasn't even all Dom under him pressing his hips into the bed; there was Dom's face when he turned to look over his shoulder, hearing the door open. There was the sparkle of his eyes emerging from the neck of his shirt when he tugged it over his head. The curve of his ass and the fine-fluted tendons on the backs of his hands, his flat stomach and its dusting of hair, his huge ears and the noises he made when Elijah licked them.

_ I was thinking about this, and I think there are some things that are hard to do that we keep working at until they destroy us, and there are some things that are hard that we do because no matter how much we love them they love us back._ Elijah brooded over that, nibbling delicately on the edge of his fingernail, pausing to look at his reddened fingertips--nope, not bleeding yet; better nibble more. Ummm.

Right, Sean. It could be worse, but does that make it easy?

_ I know you'll do the right thing--_what a relief. _I don't know what to tell you when there's no question to be answered._ Except, how long can I handle this? And some others he didn't dare to ask. _You don't have a question to be answered; you have a house, a career, a few very good friends, and a life. I know you're happy, and you know it, and you've never hurt like this because you've never had so much to want before._

Elijah read it twice without understanding it all, and he read those lines until they stopped making sense, and then he took the text of the email, put it in a text file, and saved it. He had a feeling he would eventually want to understand what it said--when he had half a brain, and maybe a cigarette or two and some more clothes. He closed the email program, saved the file. Wiggled his toes in the cold carpet and thought about getting dressed, but then instead, he ended up playing Tetris.

Dom found him almost two hours later, eyes glazed, leaning back in the chair and bathed in the blue light of the computer monitor, one hand at his mouth. He hadn't realized, actually, that he was chewing his fingernails until he had to take the hand from his mouth to accept the glass of water Dom handed him.

A pointed glance at Tetris frozen on the screen. "Productive afternoon, mate?"

Lij, having drained the glass, licked his lips and leaned over, head against Dom's stomach, lips suggestive even through the material of a t-shirt. "Started well enough," he breathed.

And now ended well enough too.

* * *

He was an actor, and so he was probably not used to being entirely honest about anything with anyone. Well, and it would be nice, but could you afford to be? Elijah was guarded, and always had been. At the same time, he wasn't used to watching very carefully what he said. In the grocery store, not "I want to kiss you," but "Maybe another flavor of icecream"; at a bar, not "Come here so I can feel you up" but "Look at that chick"; in the car, not "This couldn't be more perfect" but "Look at what a gorgeous day"; at a movie marathon, not "I'm going to lick you all over starting at your toes and suck your cock until you scream" but "I'm getting sleepy"; and never, even when he was coming, "I love you," or "Dom" the way he wanted to say it.

At the hobbit-house in New Zealand Dom had been the one from the beginning who ran to the store in the middle of the night. Elijah, however, didn't have to be very drunk to get silly, and when Dom had heaved himself out of the depths of the couch one night--pretty early, still; they hadn't known each other very well yet--he'd bounced along, and insisted on wearing his sunglasses and sticking his head out the sunroof of the jeep on the way to the convenience store.

"If I have an accident your head'll get chopped off, y'crazy yank," Dom had said gruffly, trying not to laugh, and Elijah had laughed and said,

"If it does you'll be too dead to feel guilty!" And that had been the funniest thing either one of them had heard all night.

Obviously--and Dom and Elijah had always been in total agreement on this point--only sissies and wusses and uptight annoying people drink skim milk. Which was not to call Sean those things--okay, well, maybe it was. But at any rate, in front of the milk Dom had hesitated and said with morose whimsy, "Now, I forget, _what_ kind of milk did Sean want," but he was already reaching for it.

Elijah, drunk, giddy, and bouncing up and down with "tee hee, convenience store in the middle of the night" excitement, had seized Dom's hand and crowed, "Well, you couldn't remember so you did your best. And with a drunk Elijah to watch out for--y'know, to keep me from, uh, hitting on the shepherds--" Elijah had never yet been on a midnight store run, and the novelty on top of the tequila was a bit much. "--and, you know, I distracted you so your best wasn't--"

And then Dom's eyes had lit up. "Good enough?"

Elijah had nodded emphatically, just enough to make himself dizzy, not enough to fall over. They'd watched as if enspelled as Dom's hand drifted to the 2% (not quite daring the whole).

"Sean's going to kill you," Elijah had whispered gleefully, trying not to giggle too loudly into his hands.

Dom had thrown him a look melting from startled to mischievous in a second flat and said: "But at least I'll be too dead to feel guilty."

And that had been the funniest thing in _months._ Drunkenness somehow seemed to wear off of Lijah onto Dom, so that he was also too dead to feel guilty about buying Bar-B-Q potato chips and grape-flavored condoms, and too dead to allow Elijah to hit on an actual shepherd when they ran into one in the aisle with the shampoo and toothpaste and deodorant, and too dead to resist the chocolate at the checkout or the "artificially-flavored" peach alcoholic beer crap that they couldn't stop giggling about.

Ever since then there had been a Thing with Elijah sticking his head out of sunroofs while Dom drove. The best part was that his car didn't even _have_ a sunroof (or maybe that was the worst part), so lately, it had been more of a standing-up-in-his-chair thing, just enough to make his head touch the roof, and Dom would start laughing or shake his head. Or slap his ass, you know, whatever.

That was the first thing Elijah thought of when Dom wanted to go for a drive. He blinked in a post-coital haze, with fragments of thought about having sex in wheeled office swivel chairs still drifting around and getting tangled with going-for-a-drive thoughts, so he ended up thinking "blowjob in the backseat" and "handjob while Dom drives."

"Oh," he said dumbly, "...sure."

Dom, who was either psychic or just also really fixated on thoughts of sex (and he ought to be, naked and wrapped around Elijah from behind in his office chair), grinned and said, "It's a beautiful day," and nuzzled behind Lij's ear. Lij squirmed a little on his lap, and felt the rapidly-drying stickiness of come.

"Maybe we'd better shower first," he said, and Dom then blew his mind by saying in his ear,

"Just to get all dirty again?"

Sex outside was something Elijah had never done before, but when he looked out the window--when he looked out the window an avalanche of memory came down on him with the painful power of a wicked papercut. The blue-green of the sky over the trees in his back yard, the wisp of cloud--it was dangerous, too dangerous, to remember now that day before Dom had come, when he'd stood alone by the side of the road overlooking a rolling sweep of landscape and thought of nothing but the probable taste and feel of Dom, with a palpable, gnawing weight of hunger twisting him up inside. Dom's hand was warm on his stomach, warm and too intimate with Dom's breath on his ear, or maybe it was just the breath that was the problem. Either way, he could see he was in trouble. The wavy glass was as wavy as ever, but a bit less substantial, and the "maybe fall in love" and "too late" universes were on a collision course.

If they buddy-fucked under this sky, in front of that vista, elbow-to-elbow with the ghosts Lij knew he would be able to see of the fantasy kiss--

Ah, hell. When had it not been too late?

He stood up all at once and didn't turn back and look at Dom until he stood in the door of the room, on his way to the shower--"Let's get cleaned up first." Dom's ass, with sunlight striking the curve of his spine and his ribs and his long fingers on the mouse and the keyboard.

"Let me just close this--ah, shit," a few clicks of the mouse, a ctrl+alt+del, while Elijah watched Dom nibbling on his lip, the fluid sex of him straightening again, the slope of his shoulder as he reached for the power button and turned the whole thing off. Before he followed, he smiled over his shoulder at Lij, a ragged promise in the stubbly line of his jaw.

Buddy-fucking was not without its advantages, certainly. It hadn't been long enough, yet, for more than playfulness in the warm spray of the shower, and they were both eager to get out of the house anyway. Elijah tilted his head back to expose his throat to the water, arched his back and was hardly surprised to be pressed face-first into the wall, Dom's hands tightening around his waist, mouth on his neck making more of those little red marks Elijah counted every morning. The amount of time he spent luring possessive reactions out of Dom was probably more than the amount of time Dom spent thinking about them, before or after. And of course he could tell himself that it meant something, that you don't bite the throat of anyone but your mate, and the only thing that could make a rough fuck the automatic response to a certain look of Lij's would be a powerful instinct. Right, like "the sensitive Dom, in its natural habitat, prefers to court with alcoholic beverages, or, occasionally, to forego the usual practices of courtship altogether and focus directly on the claiming of its sexual partner."

Ahem. Dom's natural habitat being LA. Anyway, there was part of him that wanted to believe that buddy-fucks are inherently casual, and the kind of sex that left bites on his shoulders was inherently _not_-casual, and that therefore they weren't buddy-fucking. No, no, they had _both_ fallen in love a long time ago!

It's easy to tell yourself that, hard to get it out of your mind once you do--but it isn't so easy to convince yourself entirely, and that was just as well. Elijah wouldn't fuck himself over so completely by lying. He would have sex next to the ghosts of a sweet and soft and tender kiss, the kind he'd used to imagine before the memorable fuck on the couch (not that he was complaining, oho no) and it would be real and gritty enough, maybe, to vanquish those ghosts forever.

"We going somewhere in particular?" Said Dom in his little dark sunglasses, turning his head curiously to look at Elijah.

"No," he lied, but he smiled so Dom would know he was lying.

That was Dom's cue to change the subject. "Good job we went t'day. We gotta get up early tomorrow to get Billy?"

"Oh, shit," Elijah sighed. "7 am."

Dom snorted with laughter. "Don't worry. I'll wake you."

Elijah slanted him a look. "You'll be up at dawn to start your usual method of waking me early enough."

A crooked little leering smirk. "I'll manage."

Elijah shook his head. "Forgive me if I set the alarm anyway."

"Nope," Dom said promptly. Another look. He was going to have a wreck at this rate--what if Dom happened to be licking his lips when he glanced over? "But I might forgive you if we have a Monty Python marathon."

Blink. Blink. "You know," Elijah said finally with what he thought ought to have been Oscar-winning presence of mind, "That's just what I was going to suggest."

"If we don't go to bed at all, we've solved that problem, then," said Dom happily. Elijah could tell by his voice that he was stretching, probably backwards. His stomach was probably showing. He carefully didn't look.

Oh, but: an opportunity to win the conversation! "You mean if we don't go to _sleep_," he grinned.

Before he had a chance to properly savor the foretaste of victory, Dom blithely crushed all his hopes by saying lasciviously, "No. I mean, if we don't go to _bed,_" which conjured unfortunate visions of the many places around the house yet to be... christened. And all the places where they _had_ done it, of course. He was surprised there wasn't a dent in the kitchen wall. And he was still quite eager to try the bathroom.

Dom had been enthusiastic about the idea of them having Billy, especially for only a week or so. It's not that Lij wasn't, either; he was just prone to thinking too much, and he inevitably got around to thinking too much about what they were going to do and what they were going to tell their friend when he got there. Telling becomes harder when you've never really talked about it yourselves, and scratch the obvious solution there. No WAY were they talking about it, no, uh-uh. Or at least, not until DOM said it. Elijah had exhausted his rights at initiation with that first drunken lick, and he cursed himself for being drunk when he had enough self-control to not just be entirely grateful for the amazing sex.

He wondered, speaking of self-control, about the secluded spot, the site of his fantasy, where he was taking Dom. What would happen? ...Maybe nothing.

It turned out to be all a matter, when they got there, of the sunlight. The kissing-place--that's how Lij thought of it now--was dimmer and darker than it had been the first time, and the light was pinker as the sun sank below the horizon. Somehow that bathed everything not red or fuschia so much as indigo, a melancholy, limpid color like a blush on the cold cheek of the coming night. It was the color a bedroom ought to be, the universe filled sky-high with dusky light like water in a crystal bowl. The crisp press of the breeze better than a thousand satin sheets.

He blanked his mind as he got out of the car so he could tell himself later he hadn't consciously looked for the same spot to stand in--and he didn't look at Dom, or touch him, yet. Maybe that was because it was too dangerous. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was because he wanted to cling to the old Dom, the Dom of dreams, for a few moments longer. The door closed behind him, gravel crunched underfoot, he could feel his own eyelashes against his cheeks when he looked down, and it was the kind of day when the rolling hills and the grass on them, burnt golden, smell like the sea merely by the power of association.

When he stood in the same spot, it all came rushing back. The look of this day and the dying deep light merged with the other in memory, and his eyes almost closed when he recalled. He had wanted so badly to put his arms around Dom, in the second after he thought _that thing_, that he had been able to feel it.

Now Dom walked up behind, and wrapped Lij in _his_ arms, but loosely and carelessly, not the bone-crushing grip Lij had thought of then. Not the press of his lips so desperate they tasted, not like Dom or Lij or a kiss, or blood, or beer, or dinner--all in his imagination, of course--but like emotion, and of course a kiss couldn't taste that way. Of course. But the thought of it made the back of his tongue come to life with little savory, near-painful bursts of tingles. He was turning in Dom's arms before he knew it, pushing his face against Dom's neck under his jaw and hugging Dom as tightly as he dared.

"Ummmmm," Dom rumbled, fingers digging into Elijah's hips, and he dove mouth-open into a slow, sleepy ravishing of a kiss, deep and lush and so thorough that if he'd owned only Elijah's mouth at the beginning, by the end he'd've owned his soul. It didn't taste very different from Dom, but as usual, the intellectualization vanished in a few seconds and he melted into it with a plaintive little whimper, pressing his body close.

"Here?" Elijah said, a question only in that he was asking for permission, when they were breathing too hard to keep up with the kissing, and his jeans had been unfastened, Dom's hand slipping inside.

"You got any place else we can go within the next second before I get you out of these?" He was shoving Elijah's jeans down. Oh, thank God for the secluded spot. And the grass.

Elijah just shook his head. There were places in New Zealand that had looked rather like this--the association was inescapable. New Zealand had been so long ago that he hadn't even known, yet, what he wanted. He'd wanted, alright, cast photo shoots, dinners, nights in the pubs and walks in the woods and drinking around the hearth of their hobbit house--but the wanting had burst on him later, in LA again, too old and powerful to be denied, too well-rooted already to be pulled out.

Now they couldn't undress fast enough, and his mind kept blurring, while he waited to get Dom's pants out of the way, around the feel of Dom's hips between his spread thighs, the look of violet sunset tinting Dom's face like underwater. There was going to be grass in Dom's hair. The longing was fierce, to be crushed too tight, to wrap his legs around Dom's waist and open his mouth on the slender elegant line of Dom's collarbone and suck on it. As much as he was Dom's in this primitive magic, Dom was his, whichever way the claiming went.

His legs wouldn't have wrapped around Dom's waist too well, but then they were naked, finally, and he found that it didn't matter too much. There was even an instant, in between trying not to scream at the bite of a longing with poisoned fangs and gasping his pleasure as he slid down to take Dom inside in one swift stroke, when he had time to smile. Then he lost that again, sinking a few final increments with his hands fisting in the grass beside Dom's ribs, arching his back, rotating his hips. Oh, it was deep, and what pain there was faded away like the initial sharpness to the taste of blood. It was deep, but not deep enough.

"Well, c'mon," said Dom breathlessly. Elijah had made him like that. Not that he was going to be particularly handy with language just now himself.

"Right." He laboriously opened his hands and used them to find Dom's hands--such pretty hands--and place them carefully on his own naked hips. Then he rocked in place, a little, forward and back. The movement set off little shockwaves without loosening the knot of teeth-clenching pleasure. Elijah's eyes were closed, after a while, because it was easier not to look at the sun-kissed pleasure-drenched lines of Dom's sweaty face.

That made it easier, too, for the ghosts. The ghost of him saying to Dom, "The first time I saw this place I knew I had to kiss you here," the ghost of Dom stroking his hair with tears on his face and dropping careless profusions of kisses, in sloppy lines, all along his jaw and his neck. The kiss of eyelashes on his cheek and the ghost of Dom whispering in his ear. It was all written inside his eyelids, faint and unreal but persistent, the last notes of a song, the memory of a hand-written anonymous love note, found inside your desk in elementary school--or one written, and left in someone else's desk at recess.

He would never write a love letter to Dom until he could find paper the color of this sky and some pretty fucking special ink, too.

He figured he was pretty safe, that way. The ghosts mocked him, holding hands, touching with hesitant wonder that almost made him cry as Dom's hands tightened on his hips, jerking up in a thrust to meet Elijah as he slid down (making him bite his lip). He didn't want hesitance--he wanted all the wonder of that, and all the dirt and dust and pollen smell and the cold wind on his back of _this._ He wanted Dom, real Dom, he did, whatever the cost.

But he couldn't stop that vision, either, the image of tears on Dom's face. He wondered if he would ever see it.

Dom's face was deeply flushed, the arms in his muscles straining as he rolled his hips to meet each thrust. Elijah's thighs were getting tired too, raising himself carefully-slowly almost off, sliding back down again, and trying, all the while, for the angle he wanted. Until, ah--Dom rocked up to meet him in a kiss, upsetting their balance, and he ended curling his hips forward--and that did it. The kiss of flame, a fast trail of it fading before he could catch it again, and he almost screamed--

Again. He wished desperately, though, for something to bite, because every thrust stroked that spot with blinding flashes of pleasure, warm suffusing bursts of it like sunwarmed water, but it created a deeper hunger every time, too.

"Baby," Dom whispered, and Lij clenched his teeth and eased his inner muscles around Dom's length tight like silk. That gained a wordless incoherence from Dom, and a burning brand in the pit of his own stomach, soaring heat. Good God.

Dom, just. A little harder. That angle again, a twist of Dom's hips, another little push of Elijah's, and his head was thrown back, making a sound like a shriek shot through with breath that might have been a scream if he hadn't pushed himself to the breaking point of exhaustion. Dom groaned, bucked, held tight to Elijah's hips, and came. His head hung; sweat was in his hair, dampening it as fast as the rising breeze could cool it. Collapsing on Dom's chest was not such a good idea, when he was this messy, but there was nothing else to do.

Sex brought, again and again, warmth and--whatever it was, a sharp flavor, a memory full of feverish brightness and delirium.

It never, ever, brought satisfaction--and the ghosts of his wants, his daydreams, didn't help. Oh, Dom. Elijah let his head fall to Dom's neck and hid kisses there, the tiniest brushes of his lips on Dom's collarbone and the hollow of his throat. There was a language to them that almost terrified him in its obviousness, a way his lips clung and curved that said "I love you, be mine," as surely as pen and ink. Dom couldn't read them, and Elijah--Elijah couldn't stop writing them.

Possible that he had enough crying stored up for both of them. Fucking sunsets. He couldn't stand many more like this one.

* * *

"We need to make a spare bed for him," Dom suggested that afternoon, coming out with two glasses of iced tea onto the back porch where Elijah was smoking.

The thought was actually startling. "Oh. Right!" He shoved at Dom half-heartedly. "It's my job to think of that, fucker."

"Y'bet yer ass," said Dom, leaning unconcernedly against the wooden rail, and since Lij really _did,_ and was quite (well, depending on your definition of it) happy to do so, there was no response. Well, the spare room wasn't a problem, but the sheets were.

"What happened to the ones from when I came here?" Dom asked.

Elijah said, without looking up, "We fucked on them."

"So can't you wash them?" Their eyes met, and Dom answered himself, "Right. So. Wal-Mart?"

Someone stole the space he was waiting for and he had to park almost all the way at the far end of one of the rows, down by the steakhouse/source of blaring country music at the extremity of the parking lot closest to the highway.

They got distracted, on their way searching for what Dom insisted on calling the "bedlinen" just like some kind of snotty department store, by the food, the electronics, and then the little girls' clothes, where there was a display of what were apparently leftover Easter hats and small glittery purses with decorations such as fake gold chains and screen-printed Powerpuff girls.

Dom dove at them with an expression of glee, and before Elijah knew it he was being steered by the shoulders to look at the hat on his head in the narrow distorted strip of reflection on the edge of a set of shelves. "You're a freak," said Elijah, pretending weariness.

"_You're_ the one wearing a hat with flowers on!" That problem was easily solved, but Dom (_never_ satisfied!) said critically, "I want one of those turquoise ones. I don't think purple is really my color."

"I don't think it's mine either." But Elijah put a second hat on top of the white and purple one.

Dom pursed his lips and tilted his head so far to the side that both of the hats slid off and he had to catch them in mid-air. Lij hastily put them away: he could see a middle-aged lady in the women's fitting rooms across the aisle eyeing them suspiciously.

"There they are," said Elijah, pointing to a tremendous white wire cage in the center of the aisle filled with down pillows.

"Noooooo, those are pillows. Hate to break it to you, Lijah."

Lij shook his head impatiently, "But they'll be _near_ there," and sure enough, three aisles down, there they were. Elijah would have gone for the first navy blue, but Dom, with his tiresome British sensibleness, insisted on 100% cotton because it was more comfortable.

Ooookay. This necessitated walking up and down two whole aisles, looking at the little labels on practically every package of the right size for a label that said something other than 50% cotton/ 50% poly. Finally they found what was apparently the cotton section--"Less than a meter wide!" said Dom indignantly, with his brows wrinkling cutely.

"Do they have twin?" said Elijah. They did. "Good." The first package was an oddly hideous dull floral pattern, but who the hell cared?

"Those're bloody _hideous_," Dom observed, earning a glower over Lij's shoulder.

"You complaining?"

He grinned and stuck out his tongue. "Who, me?"

Right, then. They paused at the beer for all of half a second before Elijah made a doubtful face and moved on. He didn't need Dom's condescending elaborate resignedness. They could buy expensive imports later at the yuppie grocery store, and it wasn't like he couldn't afford it. The side-effect of detouring through what in Wal-Mart passed for a supermarket was that they walked down the candy aisle, and Dom, without stopping him or saying anything, caught up a bag of Hershey's nuggets with toffee, his new American vice.

Elijah remembered shopping with his mom when he was too little to shop or live alone, and the angst of the candy aisle and just knowing, some days, that if you ask the answer will be "no." You don't ask, and you don't _think_ too hard about candy, because you don't want to jinx it. Being good through an afternoon of errands was the price of a bag of M&amp;Ms or Hershey's kisses, but those weren't the guaranteed result of it, and he always ended up walking down the candy aisle with his eyes on the floor. He only looked up at her voice, warm with maternal amusement, "I think I want some black licorice candy--does that sound good to you, Lijah? I'm tired of M&amp;Ms. How about frog legs?" He didn't fall for that anymore after he was about five, but then again, it'd taken him all these years to realize the amusement was because she could read his mind.

Maybe someday goodness would be its own reward, and in the meanwhile, you'd keep thinking it was, like a too-complicated mental voodoo, because you thought that's what you were required to believe.

He was just congratulating himself for only wanting to kiss Dom four times on the trip when Dom crossed his arms over his chest, displaying their sculpted mouth-wateringness perfectly, and brought the total up to five. No kissing in public, though. Lij wasn't totally overcautious, but he wasn't going to do something irretrievable, either, when he didn't even know what was going on. No need to freeze it out of the realm of half-maybes and into reality at this stage.

* * *

They didn't turn out to have time to fuck in the bathroom before Billy got there after all--or, rather, they _would_ have had if Dom hadn't been so fixated on Monty Python, and insisted they eat an entire dinner, and that Elijah drink glass after glass of water till he thought he would burst. Even except for that, but neither of them was very neat or very good at remembering things, so at three a.m. they'd finished _Monty Python's Flying Circus_ but hadn't started _The Holy Grail_, and Dom insisted on watching it. Then they had to clean the living room--of beer and pizza and trash, that is; there wasn't much more to be done for the poor leather couch, which still smelled, rather, if you knew what you were sniffing for and where to sniff.

There were a few books on the table, and a newspaper folded again not-quite-perfectly, and a little stack of unopened mail, when they were "finished."

"My mum'd never be satisfied with a room lookin' like this," said Dom with immense self-satisfaction.

"Isn't it great?" Elijah sighed. The urge to collapse on the couch and try to find the smell was so strong as to chase him outside with his cigarettes.

"Not much longer to keep awake," said Dom reassuringly as he left, and went to take a shower alone. See, if they'd only shared their showers, they could've done it then, but the problem was that they'd probably get exhausted enough, especially if they tried it standing up, that they'd either knock themselves out and drown or collapse on the floor of the bathroom immediately afterwards, asleep. Sad to admit that they were so utterly wimpy, but there it was.

Of course, the excitement of the drive and the question of being recognized helped to wake him up when it was time, and he stubbed out his cigarette on the cement step without thinking. Well, he'd do Dom a favor and not smoke out the window and "litter the lovely American countryside with ash." Presumably the front yard, unlike the highway, did not count as the countryside.

"So we managed to stay awake," said Elijah. Without going to bed. Or anything else.

"Well," said Dom, "there's always later." For sleep or for fucking in the hallway, the basement stairs, the back porch, under the dining room table?

Elijah let it go with a mental shrug. Hopefully there would be time for both.

They put up the radio and down the windows (as Dom liked to say) and let the wind ruffle their hair and rush in their ears to mute any possibility of conversation. By the time they got to the airport Elijah was almost blue in the face from not trying very hard to achieve a perfect indifference to the movements of Dom's mouth and neck.

Billy's plane had arrived ten minutes early, but thank God they found him in the baggage claim area. They didn't get recognized for the first time until Dom had one of Billy's bags and they were all craning at weird angles, trying to see the mouth of the baggage carousel. Then it was the telltale whispering and little flurries of noise and the cleared throat. "Ex--excuse me. Are you Elijah Wood?"

He turned around smiling, and abandoned Dom and Billy to the baggage. "Yes, I am."

"Oh, and--oh! That's--!" He could see things ticking over in the woman's head. "The other hobbit!" Which one she meant to refer to Elijah couldn't tell. The little boy with her nodded solemnly with tremendous eyes not quite as green as Dom's, and Elijah signed a napkin with a red felt-tip pen and made his apologies, grabbing Billy's second bag out of his hand. They didn't ask for Dom's signature or Billy's, at least, not loud enough for them to hear after the mass of people closed around them again.

Dom climbed meekly into the back seat for the ride, and Billy rode shotgun. He was good at small talk, and the wind was just loud enough to make it intermittent. Dom was behind him, just visible when he turned his head to answer Billy. Most of the time, then, he was driving and couldn't see, but the awareness of the Dom's presence sparked like hot, dry sex on his tongue and sunburn on the back of his neck. God, he was thirsty.


	3. Fever

"You can't tell me you've never wondered," Billy said, because he misinterpreted why Elijah was choking.

Dom patted him on the back and said in his patented Dom Accent, "Y'okay, mate?" Ah yes. Mate. Dom calling him mate. Had a special sort of poignance to it now, didn't it? He slanted a glance at Dom, thought the word again. Mate. He decided that yes. Fierce hot swell of it that he clamped down on, and he shook his head at Billy, leaning back into the chair and incidentally into Dom's hand.

Then he leaned back more. And sprawled in his chair, legs apart, until he felt completely debauched. And grinned: "No, actually. I don't have to wonder." Dom, surprised, glanced at him, but his lips were twitching, and when he wrapped his arm around Elijah's shoulders it was only awkward at first.

And that was how they told Billy.

Billy blinked a little, and then laughed, and got up for another piece of mostly-cold pizza, which was getting to be almost Lij and Dom's entire diet. "Well," he said over his shoulder, "no one could say you don't have a sense of dramatic timing, you two."

"Hey," Dom disclaimed, but he was grinning.

Elijah bounced up from his chair for another beer, and bent to nudge against Billy's shoulder. "Yeah. And you know what? I'm also pretty good at making an entrance."

"You should look into acting," said Billy in his perpetually-ingenuous Scots intonation, and Elijah thanked him. One of the first things Billy had said when they got in had been, "Is that Monty Python I see?"

Now they were pretty well committed to watching _Time Bandits_ (thankfully they had a third), the second night of Monty Python in a row, only without sleep in between. "Popcorn," Elijah mused, trying to remember if he had any. "...Or maybe just potato chips."

"Yes," Dom announced though no one had said anything, "Lij _is_ usually this interesting." Which was just totally unfair and drew an outraged glare.

"That's not what you said yesterday afternoon," said Elijah. Dom's exact words, in fact, had been more like "baby" or "oh FUCK yeah," depending on what part of the afternoon you wanted to draw them from.

"I'll just be going in the living room and pretending not to eavesdrop, then," said Billy, eyebrows arched.

Dom grinned at Elijah and followed Billy. Chips, then. It wasn't so much that he couldn't have Dom alone with anyone else as that all of a sudden he wasn't so sure about having Dom out of his sight, like everything that had happened since they'd last seen Billy was even _less_ real than never talking about it could make it.

On the plus side, there wasn't going to be any sleeping-arrangement awkwardness, and nothing said he had to let go of Dom all night...

...Especially not Dom, who wrapped an arm over the arm Lij flung across his chest and agreeably tangled their legs. And when Elijah woke up, Dom's face was buried in his hair. Not that he was going to stop the sleeping, however much elbowing and kicking and blanket-stealing accidentally went on, especially not after such a few short months of it. But still, he couldn't help feeling their bodies were lying to him, wrapping so neatly and quietly together, bronzing and warming in the early light from the window like one entity. The careless weight of Dom's hand in the small of his back suggested something that, six months ago when he was sane, would have scared him. Now it was too tempting, but it didn't make him afraid so much as tired.

And, after all, the only conceivable solutions involved pulling back or asking Dom to, and what a confrontation that'd be: "Could you stop being so affectionate?" And who knew if he _could._ Didn't he cherish Dom's friendship, and didn't he know Dom wasn't so easy and open with almost anyone, and maybe lately anyone at all? And hadn't they acted, well, pretty much the same before--with the exception of the fucking? No, if he couldn't handle it, it was all his own fault.

He was determined not to make himself insane from overindulgence (Dom as a drug, yeah), but that didn't mean he could stand to deny himself.

It wasn't at all hard to sneak out of bed and leave Dom asleep. He put on a shirt and went to make coffee, only to discover Billy hovering over the coffee maker and frowning. They talked in that hushed visiting-over-breakfast way, and Elijah fidgeted with the newspaper, folding and unfolding it and smoothing out the creases. Finally Elijah thought about breakfast and realized all they had were eggs and cereal.

"D'you want to get bagels or something?" He asked, scrubbing a hand over his face.

"Sure," Billy said, a lovely round _oo_ sound in his mouth.

"So, what's it like?" Billy wondered, when they were alone in the car, and Lij started and nearly swerved into the median. "Oops. Watch it, there."

"Um, what's it like--with a--I mean, I thought you were bi," said Elijah confusedly in a heap.

"Oh," Billy laughed, "no, I'm not, but it's not what I'm askin'." Oh. "What's it like--with you, and _Dom_?" Admirable control kept his hands steady on the steering wheel through that bombshell.

He bit his lip and looked sideways, wondering what to say. "It's like--listen, there's--nothing _else_ is going on." Being miserable tended to make him confused, and also defensive, but either he hadn't quite reached the defensive point yet or he felt he owed better to Billy.

There was silence in the car, and he saw Billy look surprised before he changed the subject. They got bagels, though, and when they were driving back he managed to change it back again in one of the most tricky round-about ways Lij had ever imagined.

"Did you know," he said, twisting the neck of the clear plastic bag in his hands, "that I used to play the French horn in high school?"

"No!"

"Well, I did," said Billy with an odd kind of resolution.

Elijah tilted his head, thinking of Christmas ornaments and illustrations. "Did you like it?"

"It was bloody difficult," was the answer, "but I liked it. There's a lot about it that's not so very easy to learn, like what to do with your mouth when your fingers are a certain way to make a different note." Elijah was starting to get lost, which Billy seemed to sense, so he added, "It's very complicated. Takes control," and he indicated the muscles around his mouth.

"Uhuh."

"...Of course, it also takes time to learn," Billy continued thoughtfully, almost as if he were talking to himself: "Time and practice. Some things, though--practice won't do a'tall. If there's a really hard part, you know, in one of the songs...sometimes I could play it and play it and never get it right, like if you've got to switch to a higher note at once, and you have to do it with your mouth really quick. It's odd," he continued, slowing his words deliberately, "It's odd because you know you don't how to do it, but you know--how to know how to do it--before you know. You can feel yourself almost know it, and almost do it. And then one day you go to bed and when you wake up, it doesn't even have to make sense, it just _is._ And you do it right without thinking about it, because your mind sort of knows how to learn how to handle it on its own. Until that happens, there's nothing you can do but wait."

There were some moments of silence with that cryptic story filling the car like the tick of a clock or like drops of water splashing from a leaky faucet, and Elijah was almost so upset as to miss the turn to his street. He pulled too fast into the driveway, screeched to a halt and almost slammed the door behind him. Billy was watching him, maybe a little anxiously.

He had to say something. What he came up with was, "There are some things you can't learn to not need."

Billy shook his head. "No indeed, you can't." Was that a _smile?_ "That's not what you're going to learn."

Dom was up and had made a fresh pot of coffee when they came inside. He looked up at them in that quick, suspicious-looking Dom-in-the-morning way that made Elijah's teeth ache, a little wrinkle between Dom's brows and Dom's mouth still. It wasn't suspicious, really, so much as sleepy, and Elijah had a premonition of teasing, "It wasn't me," a million times until it became a running joke, because he'd have a right to, and with how tired Dom was this early in the morning he wouldn't get it the first time, and he might never think it was funny. He wanted to say it anyway. He wanted to have the right.

There was Billy, going for some auditions during the day, and Elijah with another meeting scheduled with his agent, for which he put on his youth like a sort of heavy mask. He was starting to feel old, lately. When he came back there was a note on the table weighted with the salt shaker. _Out to look at lannscapes._ No signature. In that handwriting, none was necessary. Dom brooding over the lovely American landscapes, and mourning, no doubt, their pollution with ash, as opposed to the sappy twelve-year-old-with-a-crush thoughts Elijah would have in his place (oh look, a _tree_! I bet Dom likes _trees_...).

After three days of a lot of talking with Billy and no direct references to Dom, and a lot of cuddling but only one actual instance of sex, Elijah realized that a week was shorter than it sounded. "Hey, you know," he said, "we should do something, if we're going to."

"Like what?" Said Billy.

He shrugged. "Um... well, we're in LA. There's going to be something."

In a city like LA, where not only was there _something_ but there was bound to be _some_ of everything, what they ended up doing was going "cosmic" bowling around nine, under blacklights that turned the white of Dom's shirt pale neon lavender. Multi-colored shifting light-stencils danced on the wall above the lane they had. The bowling shoes--as that style had recently become a little popular--actually looked, especially in the dark when you couldn't see their muddy color, like something that Lij might have worn with his outfit. Smellier, of course (ew), but a pretty close match.

The maroon vinyl seats arranged around the ball-return machines were one thing in the room not influenced appreciably by the blacklight, so whichever two of them sat there were bathed in shadow but for the lights of the tv scoreboard on their faces.

Billy wanted to try bowling in his sock feet--and he didn't score, but neither did he drop the ball on his foot. That was Elijah's job: he somehow (huh, could that have been the beer...?) managed to miss when he was picking up a ball, and crush his fingers under the edge of it. He had gone too long without bowling, apparently (something he had not thought he would ever say, he thought, blinking).

They took turns buying new rounds of beer, and if their game suffered, they also cared less. Dom, the designated driver, actually made a strike, which caused him to do an impromptu little hip-swiveling victory dance. Ummmmm, Dom in tight jeans? Yes, just, yes. Elijah was feeling really, really odd--and maybe that was just being possessive, maybe arousal, maybe beer. Some combination of them? Or the backlash from his monumental efforts, over the last few days, to not think too hard about Billy's french horn story?

The lights were off, to provide for the blacklights, and the little machines that flickered disco-y colored motifs on the floor and the walls were scattered randomly. Elijah jumped up onto the carpet where the little tables and chairs were set out to stand bathed in red light. He had vague, hysterical-ironic thoughts about blood, but when he stuck out his arm and looked it it it was really more of a raspberry color. Hey, that would work too. He was a bit skinny, but Dom was generally susceptible. Being food couldn't be all that bad, assuming, of course, that you weren't _really_. But being bitten, and sucked on, yes, he had a Thing for that. Lij just stopped himself from nodding sagely at this conclusion and put out a hand on the little half-height brick wall to steady himself.

With Billy in the house, even Billy knowing, he'd had to steal kisses, lately. There was something thrillingly illicit about that--sneaking them in, quick and silent, in corners, that is--although of course the curtailed sex was a little frustrating. And he had to try, too, not to be too affectionate. He guessed he was striving for a "you're my best friend and I want to jump your bones" vibe, and not an "oh let me kiss you until you can't help but love me like I love you" one. Exactly how different those might be was probably debatable, but he wasn't up to debating the question with himself. And obviously there was no one else to talk about it with. So what Elijah did was try to make the kisses pure sex, wicked licks under Dom's ear and open-mouthed wet ones on the back of his neck, sudden deep nasty ones instead of the sanctity of deliberate tender (still, of course, deep) ones he could envision.

So he'd gotten into the habit of it, was the point. Yes. The habit of secretive affection (ha. Ha. Ha. Secretive--in more than one way!). Now it was awfully tempting. Billy had caved to peer pressure and put his bowling shoes back on, but he immediately proceeded to get another gutter ball.

Dom clapped and smacked Billy on the back, apparently stopping just short of ruffling his hair. "That was fantastic! It took _much_ longer to reach the gutter than the one before it!"

Billy elbowed him good-naturedly in the side. "Shut it, arsehole."

"Tosser."

"Wanker."

"Straight man," Dom came up with after only a slight hesitation.

"That doesn't mean what I think you thought--you think--it means," Billy said, only a bit slurrily.

"Y'knew what I meant!" Dom snapped indignantly.

"Fuck you, you _fuck_," was the affectionate reply. Dom seemed pleased and gave a little bow with flourishes.

Elijah leapt back down among the chairs (to their level--hee hee) just to bury his face in Dom's shoulder and laugh. Then, of course, while Dom straightened just-perceptibly under the additional weight, he had to curl his body up, a little, on the sudden dry thirst burning through him for skin and sweat and sex and every little inch of Dom and the taste of his come.

"Poor Lij," Dom announced, "Can't handle our harsh British insult-flinging."

"Cunt," Billy grinned at Elijah, settling in a chair with a beer: "It's your turn." Lij got a total of two pins--

"Just to make you feel better," he said, winking at Billy, and wandering towards the impenetrable dark environs of the arcade in the far corner past the shoe-rental counter.

"I'm going to go see what Lij is up to," he heard Dom say, and smirked to himself. Oh yeah. Heterosexuality beware. Although maybe it was a bit late for that.

"But your turn," Billy was saying. Too late for that as well, ahah. The Dom-animal, once on the scent of its mate, will not give up the pursuit until it has him pinned up against the wall.

"Got any quarters?" Lij wondered, staring blankly at the pinball machine. Dom, of course, would be right behind his shoulder--thus the wild parched need slowly pushing out from his center. Damn, it almost hurt, a good pain, but he might feel like a bloody pulp in the wake of this desire.

Dom felt in his pockets. "Fucking American money," he muttered.

Elijah was totally in sympathy. No pinball, then. "We could get some. The shoe counter. Or the bar."

But Dom wrinkled his nose, "Eh," and he was advancing on Elijah with almost unnoticeable slow liquid movements. His eyes sparked gray in the darkness, and Elijah found himself backing away with a conscious invitation in the curve of his back and neck. Maybe his mouth begged for it--he hoped. Up against the wall in the narrow space between the pinball machine and another game, the corner of the room, shrouded in deepest shadow. The wall smacking into his shoulderblades and the grin on Dom's face. Oh, he had been waiting for this--all night. Elijah licked his lips and tilted his chin up to accept a savage kiss with heated enthusiasm, devouring every drop of Dom he could get.

"Damn you," Elijah panted, ripping at the sides of Dom's fly to get the zipper open.

"Quietly, now," Dom chuckled, spreading his hand flat on Lij's stomach under his T-shirt. Elijah arched into the touch, which caused his hips to get in the way of his hands. Finally he had Dom's jeans open and his own pants, one-handed fumbling with the button and muttered curses giving way to the slick slide. And thank God for his boxers and Dom's dislike for underwear. Dom breathed harsh and wet near his ear, pushing his forehead on the wall next to Elijah's head, wrapped a hand slowly around both of them and started jerking them, rough uneven movements that hitched his breath all up in his throat.

"Oh, God."

That hiss might, at one point, have been "Yes." His shirt was riding up in the back, his legs apart to hold one of Dom's thighs between. The wall was carpeted--goddamned bowling alley, he was going to have rugburn for the first time when he hadn't done it on the floor--and oh, oh, _shit._ Video games pinged in the background, but the rest of the room was sort of fading into and out of his awareness.

Elijah gritted his teeth and ground their hips together. Fuck. This wasn't _working._ He twined one leg up around Dom's hips, going for a new angle, and turned his face, nuzzling for a kiss. He got a sharp bite on his lower lip--okay, that was good too.

This mutual-masturbation, well, it wasn't quite that, was maybe almost sex, but at any rate--it wasn't good enough, at all. Elijah managed to push Dom's hand aside, stupid fucking tease, and replace it with his own for some even, sure strokes, going faster.

"Slow," Dom protested.

Whatever protest Lij has been going to offer was lost against Dom's mouth.

Mmmm, but what a way to go. Elijah's hands had forgotten what they were doing, and now he just twitched his hips into Dom's, their cocks sliding and dragging together all wrong, with horribly uneven friction. He wrapped his leg tighter around Dom's hips and tried (emphasis on tried) to breathe. Although maybe he wasn't trying very hard, because--

Ah, and all of a sudden (he really didn't know how this happened) he was higher up on the wall, really actually _pinned_ there with Dom's weight and his feet off the ground, his pants below his ass. There was a harsh fumbling, and Dom stepping closer between his legs and he could _feel_ it, Dom's cock sliding along his ass. Elijah bit his tongue and tried not to make noise, and scrabbled with his fingers at the dusty smoke-scented carpet on the wall.

Arched his back in vain. Dom pushed forward with his hips, only, Lij thought, to keep him from falling, but the effect was the blunt head of his cock skipping past the tight cluster of nerves and muscle where all Elijah's attention was focused. Breathing was getting so difficult that he wasn't sure if he was anymore and couldn't devote the attention to finding out, and all of a sudden he was _hyper_-aware of the rest of the room. He thought, behind Dom's shoulder, that was a kid about thirteen years old silhouetted against the light of one of those tremendous videogame booths. But he trembled violently with the fever of staying still, and tried to relax but couldn't remember how. Nerves were building up like fine tangled webs, pulsing and filled with little swollen knots of sensation, on the surface of his skin. He imagined all of him skin-crawlingly lumpy, blue and red under the blacklight and shadow. Maybe bleeding. Shitshitshit, Dom. He flexed his hips. Knew they could fuck right here, on the wall.

Dom, breathing raggedly into his neck, answered the thrust with another emphatic little push, but Lij could tell he wasn't going to do it without permission, just hold onto his hips hard and lift him a little more till he could feel Dom's cock nudging at him, much like his tongue flirted, darting out to taste the column of Elijah's neck.

Elijah, knowing he couldn't do anything more stupid, probably, let himself relax bonelessly, go soft and pliant and slide down, a little, until he felt himself start to part around the hot heat of it. He could feel the burn of hard vertical sex without lubricant already, could taste it like want with its hands around his throat and its breath on his cheek.

"Careful!" Dom hissed, and took the skin of Elijah's throat between his teeth.

"Bit late," Elijah panted, into Dom's hair. "--Innit?"

Dom mumbled something--or maybe that was a growl. Every muscle in their two bodies was tensed rigid and unyielding, and they were frozen like that, on the verge of joining. God. If he just squirmed a little farther down.

Carpet in his back, boy over Dom's shoulder, where, oh where was sanity? The video game just on the other side of whatever was shielding them to his right shook violently, pinging and bleating, with some not-so-distant yelling. "Daddy! Come look at this!" Ah, _fuck._ The timely (..._God!_) intrusion of the real world, and Dom said "Fucking _cunt_ sons of bitches," and some more colorful things than that, and pulled back. Elijah fumbled with his pants, fingers unsteady.

He was sweat and sex all over, and he didn't want to see his mouth or his hair. Dom's mouth and hair, on the other hand, oh yes. He could look at them for some time yet, and he only smoothed Dom's tousled ruffianish look out a little, because it was just too irresistable, and he couldn't think of a better idea on this kind of crack (namely, not crack at all. Dom.) than exposing himself to Dom at his most tempting for the rest of the night.

And, yes. Getting more drunk, so he picked up more beer. That seemed like the best idea of all.

"Nother game?" Dom said. Billy looked back and forth between them and Elijah took a long drink.

* * *

"How exactly," said Billy in the car on the way to Boys Town (and a trendy gay bar) later that night, "do you get dehydrated, if you're _not_ already ill?"

Elijah would probably have found this annoying, but he had a sense of owing Billy one, or, you know, several, for leaving him alone in the bowling alley while they made out. Almost fucked. Whatever. "You don't get any water, basically, which means you don't eat or drink."

Billy stared, and tried and failed not to laugh. "For how long?"

Had he ever really thought about it before? "Well, it's not that I didn't eat or drink at _all,_ just not very much. A few weeks, I guess."

A whoop of laughter which he didn't try as hard, this time, to turn into a cough. "I won't say you deserved it, Lij, but..."

"If he ever was going to deserve it, that would be when," said Dom over his shoulder from the driver's seat.

Elijah found that funny, possibly because of the beer.

It was as they were getting out of the car that he caught Billy for an apology. "I'm sorry," he said a little anxiously, chewing on his lip. "That was rude, at the bowling alley--"

Billy only laughed. "Oh, Elijah, d'ya think I'd want it on my conscience if I'd _stopped_ you?" His eyes were dancing. "Besides, this way, I won."

"You been before?" Dom said quizzically, hesitating at the curb for Lij.

"Not to _this_ one. It's all new."

"Trendy," Billy supplied, grinning from one of them to the other.

It didn't look like a _new_ hotspot. It was dark, yes, with expensive recessed lighting, but the woodwork was antique and rather ornate in places. There was a little note on the wall that said it'd been taken from a condemned hotel from before the turn of the century. Billy ran loving hands over the edge of the bar while Lij ordered a drink (amusingly, the bartender just gave him a 'you're underage' _look_, and didn't ask anything).

"So," Billy said later, nursing a Guinness, "What's being dehydrated like, then? You weren't just thirsty, mate, if you went to 'ospital?"

Dom laughed (although not really in an amused way--his eyes were dark) and shook his head, "He was almost fuckin' dead. Fainted four times."

Lij swirled his rum and coke thoughtfully. "Well, it's. It's sort of like just being really sick and feverish, but I didn't have a fever. I was really--_really_ confused. Hardly knew what I was thinking about." Which wasn't true. He knew what he had been thinking about: Dom, and some other stuff, pretty much the story of his life over the past six months. The world seemed to fall apart that way a lot, lately. Dom and "sexsexsex" and other stuff. He added as an afterthought, "And I wasn't thirsty."

"You were bloody insane," said Billy, wide-eyed.

"Yeah, well." Lij drained the glass, looked for the bartender. Recessed white light in the bar, dim but clear, silvered the wooden surface over the wood's natural rose, a smooth glossy polish. Depended how you defined it, but it couldn't be _normal._ "I wasn't almost dead, though."

The bar stools here had smooth-curved backs and little arms, rungs just the right height for hooking your heels over. There was a wide brass bar at foot-height too, around the bar, and tables with more tall chairs out on the edges of the room, smoky and dark, surreal with multicolored expensive lighting. The dance floor was brilliantly spotlighted, behind them. Someone came fresh from it, smelling of sweat, blond hair on end, wearing a muscle tank. His eyes went up and down Lij quickly and moved to Billy. Maybe lingered a bit longer there. Elijah smiled into his drink.

"You can dance," Billy protested.

"Don't you want to?" Lij asked, exchanging glances with Dom, but it was perfunctory. Billy didn't and they couldn't leave him. He wasn't sure he entirely wanted to either. To push and slide and rub against Dom? Yes. But the bowling alley corner had been bad enough, delicious but guilty and illicit. Dirty, yes. The rugburn on the small of his back was like a brand. He didn't feel he had the right, perhaps.

The music was satisfyingly loud, and the people-watching was fascinating. Dom leaned against the bar between the stool where Billy perched and the one Elijah filled--what he was doing was more like lounging, though. Lounging in the same kind of nervous whatever he'd been in all night, yet, tight-strung and too alert. The drinks were fuzzing everything, but he wasn't relaxing. He could feel his eyes burning in his face. When Dom turned his head, smiling, the low lighting kissed his lower lip, threaded its fingers in his hair, and skated back behind him. His bicep and the careless bend of his arm were exquisite.

And there was just a slight possibility that Elijah might have a staring problem.

Right. He was disgusted with himself, sometimes. Or rather, he felt he should be, but he couldn't really quite make himself. Then again, he definitely had a staring problem, and he might as well embrace it entirely. He'd embraced the unpredictable wicked-sharp barbs of--this thing, he and Dom, his silly crush--or, no, loving. Being in love with Dom, alright. He'd given into it long enough ago that he'd virtually gotten used to not pretending to himself. So yes, staring. He lapped it up.

"We should have a deck of cards," Dom said. "Build a little house."

"Houses o' cards are so boring," Billy protested. "A hobbit-hole of cards."

"You're drunk," Dom said tolerantly. "Hobbit-holes are too round; it wouldn't stand up."

"Billy's right, though!" Elijah leaned forward, grinning. "Because we need to have solidarity."

Dom was doubtful, apparently, that he really understood where Lij was going with that: "Middle Earth solidarity?"

What a silly question. "What else would I be talking about?"

"An Orthanc of cards!" Dom said, abruptly getting into the spirit.

But Billy pursed his lips, "That's kind of tall and skinny. It wouldn't want to stand up straight."

"You don't want to stand up straight either, but I bet I could make you," Dom retorted.

"And making things with cards," said Elijah hastily, "isn't supposed to be _easy_."

"But still."

Eventually they settled for a castle of cards. "What castle?" Billy wondered. They were far past considering that they didn't have any cards.

"There are plenty, aren't there," Dom said reasonably.

"Sauron's castle."

"He doesn't have a castle! Just another tower!"

"Minas Tirith?" said Elijah.

Billy was thoughtful. "How abouuuuuuuuut..." (only, of course, 'aBOOT') "...the Castle of the Mark?"

"But then," said Dom, "that would make Elijah Éowyn."

"How did _I_ get to be the damsel in distress?" Dom gave him a level look that said all it needed to. Good point. Fuck. Elijah sighed and knocked back the rest of his drink in one.

Billy snorted.

"Don't worry," said Dom soothingly, smirking. "I'll save you."

"Damn," said Lij sarcastically, "and me without my handkerchief." Billy helpfully provided him with a napkin, which he dropped on the floor. Dom, with a cheeky look, bent over to retrieve it. His shirt rode up and his jeans down, which showed a nice gap of the small of his back and perhaps (or maybe that was Elijah's imagination) some of his ass. Unfortunately, they were facing--he hadn't thought fast enough to drop it where Dom would have to turn around.

He pretended to offer it, and snatched his hand back when Lij reached for it.

Billy chortled and took another drink.

Another try, and Dom did a little flourish with it just out of reach. Elijah rolled his eyes. "See if I drop my handkerchief with you around again."

Dom's eyes smoldered, "Oh, but you will."

"You know, it's just a napkin, not a handkerchief. You can have it." Hmph. He couldn't help thinking there was some kind of symbolism, though. You're supposed to give the handkerchief back. That's what it was about, right? You drop it on purpose and if he gives it back that means--

"Although, Lijah, if you're Éowyn, try not to get killed," said Billy.

"I think we've really hit on something," Dom sniggered. "He's awfully good at dressing up like a boy."

Couldn't help giggling at that, though he stuck out his tongue. "I am, aren't I?" He said. "A handsome boy with good taste in clothes."

"Taste is immaculate," Billy agreed blithely, and Dom slowly folded the napkin up in his hand. Their eyes met with a fantastic kind of glimmer, he thought. Heat. Like the shivers in the summer air, ripples in water. Maybe the wavy glass. And maybe he was getting hysterical. (But only on the inside, my dear!) Dom smiled and he was pinned as surely as he'd been to the carpeted wall behind the pinball machine a lifetime ago, at ten pm. God knew if he was smiling back, but he really hoped not: the wisps of smoke and darkness and colored light and noise, here, like layered veils obscuring reality, and he wanted it to be real. _Dammit,_ Dom, say something. Too much longer like this without the solidity and he'd vanish. Okay, hysterical, yes, and he didn't have any reason to be so suddenly angry. He was looking away... now.

A flashbulb went off and his head whipped around, mouth open. A youngish man, relatively innocuous, was standing there with a camera, grinning.

Elijah leapt off the bar stool while Dom was still blinking. "Did you just take a picture of me?" Yes, moron. Well, not that he didn't know the answer. But the guy blinked, turned around. Walking away without saying anything? "Oh, no, he didn't," Lij muttered, and stalked after him. "Ex_cuse_ me," he shouted. Of course the crowds are the densest and the realest when you want to get through them, but at their most metaphysically ephemeral when you're clutching for purchase on the universe.

Having to shoulder between sweaty bodies did increase immediacy, a bit, but it didn't change the fundamentally transparent-transient nature of what he had. If Dom started pretending tomorrow that nothing had happened, it could still vanish. _No_ he didn't want that, but no asshole's photograph was going to get in Dom's way if _Dom_ did.

Finally, the door! The sudden fresh air, and lack of bodies pressed close, let him practically burst out and sprint with the momentum. He caught up with the guy on the sidewalk just outside and put a hand on his arm.

A wary look on his face when he spun around, camera still in his hand. Night sparkled around them with stars.

"Excuse me!" Lij said determinedly. "You took a picture of me. That's not acceptable. You didn't ask my permission--"

"I'm not a paparazzi!" The guy protested.

Elijah raked him with a contemptuous gaze. Obviously not, or he'd have gotten away. "I want the film," he said.

"But--!"

"I don't want that picture of me to exist," Elijah said firmly. "Give me the film."

He was conscious of Dom and Billy behind him, but he couldn't spare his attention. He thought he might start shaking too from nerves and outrage and anger and he was ready to kick the whole goddamned fame thing in the ass if not for _Lord of the Rings,_ because without it he'd never even have met Dom.

"It's my picture," said the man sullenly. He had a yellow tinge to his skin, narrow rounded cheeks and a wide pale mouth. His face was scarred. He would have had acne as a teenager.

"No," Elijah said with a tight rein on his temper. "It's my picture. The film." He put his hand on the camera, and Sallow Camera Boy's shoulders slumped.

"I can't believe him," Elijah fumed in the car, "That motherfucking bastard, that cunt!"

"He should have asked," said Billy. "At least you got the film."

No music on, the windows half down on the late summer night. All LA smelled fresh at a time like this, a function of the wind more than the actual smell. "Not even that he didn't ask. Well, yes. But when I _ask_ for it and he didn't give it to me!"

"And if the pictures should happen to get out," came the sympathetic Scottish murmur. Of course it hardly mattered what he said, so long as he said something.

Elijah's fist tightened around the roll of film. He'd already pulled it all out. Though it was night, he'd taken vicious pleasure. It probably wasn't completely exposed, but it was too snarled a mess to develop. When they got home he fully planned to go after it with scissors.

It was the night of frustration, and when he got the scissors out of the drawer in the kitchen, he flung them and the film down on the table in inexplicable exasperation and went to get a tall glass of water. No hangovers tomorrow, thanks. The water splashed on him when he turned it on too hard. He drained the glass, poured another and drank half of it, staring at the wall behind the sink and thinking essentially nothing but "fuck" over and over again. He didn't like feeling helpless or confused.

Billy had gone straight to bed. When he walked back into the living room, he could see at a glance that all the lights were out. Dom too, then. He walked close to a window, staring at his ghostly reflection with its red-rimmed eyes, closeclosecloser until he pressed their noses together and closed his eyes.

The bottom line, he thought, was that if nothing was real then nothing should hurt.

Maybe his face was wet. Anyway, it was the kind of mood where it should be raining--late summer rain, fast and hard, not sodden and heavy like early, in June. The time was past for the unstirring moroseness of stagnant despair.

It's hard to admit to yourself that you're waiting for something, when it's something you don't want to be waiting for--maybe he was afraid he'd miss it, somehow, if he couldn't greet whatever it was that must happen with innocence. Like a castle of cards, it all might fall apart if you looked at it funny from the corner of your eye.

But he had to wait. And he was somehow not surprised, then, to feel a hand on his shoulder. He bit his lip and tasted rum, and the same wind that had cooled his cheeks outside the club, that had ruffled their hair in the car, now stirred the dusk-green leaves of a tree in the darkness. The movement was so vivid, as if in slow motion, that he could almost hear the shift and rustle of the leaves.

Trust Dom to come now, when he didn't have a handle on himself. Elijah was crying silently, to his horror. He wished he could be sullen instead of pitiful. What was he going to say, to whatever question he was given? Dom, who would know just the questions to ask, probably, and would ask them because he was genuinely worried.

But he didn't. He came to stand next to Lij at the window instead, turned to look at him, saw the tears, and moved perilously closer all at once, tightening his grip on Lij's shoulder. "No, Lijah," he said. "Hey. Hey."

Bit his lip--yep, still rum, haha. Blinking rapidly, and he shook his head maybe too rapidly at the same time. Becoming dizzy hadn't been in the plan.

"No, you don't understand," Dom said, "I know." And goddamn him, but he didn't seem to have the second half of that sentence ready.

Elijah, who didn't trust his voice yet, turned to face him, wiping quickly at his cheeks with his free hand.

"No," Dom said, almost impatiently, and then stopped and dropped his gaze. Embarrassed? No. Certainly not--"No," Dom said, "I mean, I know. I know it. I, um. I saw something."

He went very, very cold all over and all at once, at this announcement. First, he thought at once the only thing he would have meant if _he_ had said just "know" like that, the thing Dom couldn't possibly mean. Second he thought just that, that it was flatly impossible. But then he had time to pause. He looked at Dom's face again. _Saw something._

He didn't have time to think anything else about it. Dom was coming amazingly closer again, with a step that seemed almost cautious, but then he turned them in profile to the window and tipped Lij's chin up with his finger and kissed him again, an old kiss and a new one together, as gentle as any fantasy, but realer. Oh, he knew.

"I know," Dom repeated, without moving his mouth more than a millimeter or so away. It was a good thing his arm was around Elijah's back then, because he was having a lot of trouble with understanding everything and he might have just collapsed in a heap on the floor.

"You know."

"It was on the computer," he said, "And it came up when I turned it on and opened the program, and I shouldn't have read it and I'm really really sorry, but I wasn't even thinking."

The kissing was nice, but Elijah was too numb to quite know what to think.

"Lijah?"

"You read--" Oh, the email. The one from Sean, the only thing he'd ever saved. Fate, baby. "I don't--I just." He met Dom's eyes again. "Why now." He could read it in Dom's face: not that he didn't have a reason, but that he couldn't answer. Elijah nodded. Yes. He understood--understood that. He couldn't even string a whole thought together at once. Fuck, he needed to think. He laid his face against Dom's neck for a moment, and then walked away, and Dom didn't try to stop him.

* * *

He went in the bathroom, cold and white and too-bright, because it was the only room small enough and bright enough to feel safe. He sat down on the closed lid of the toilet, as the only real place to sit, and set about properly gnawing on his fingernails. Yes, he remembered the computer crashing, and the email of Sean's he'd pasted into the word processor to save and read later. Dom pushing the power button, naked. Their drive and fucking in the long grass at the fringes of the most perfect landscape he'd ever seen. He couldn't really be surprised Dom had read the email, and without it he would have known, anyway. Elijah couldn't have hidden it entirely if he'd wanted to. If.

He _hadn't_ hidden it, hadn't tried hard enough to do more than tell himself he was.

So, then. Why now?

...Of course it was important to be able to appreciate things. If you've never been denied anything, you can't know what you have. If you get an easter basket and tear off wrapper after wrapper and eat all the chocolate bunnies and medallions and Reese's cups at once, after a while it's just a blur of chocolate--not like savoring one as a reward. And a rain never heals like after a drought.

There was a little, narrow window in the bathroom, high up on the wall, with a tear in the screen that he could see when he glanced up. A small moth the rich brown of corduroy trousers had flown in and was fluttering ineffectually around the shower stall, flying, occasionally, into the white tiles on the wall, mostly flailing and buzzing about uselessly (without, of course, actually making much noise).

The door opened, and oh, he thought almost sardonically at himself, I didn't lock it? Dom stood in the door and said, "I maybe should've left you alone a bit longer, but then I figured you can always kick me out again, so I'll give this another try." Pause. "I'm driving myself fucking insane and I'm actually standing here, talking to you, about something that makes not enough sense in my head to turn into a real sentence, which should tell you something too. I've never seen anything like you. I've never had a friend like you, and I know you inside out--heh--but I can't ever know _all_, er, _enough_ of it. Ah fuck. Lij--" His voice was turning pleading, and Lij blinked. "Even, like, the fact that this weirds you out. See, I knew that. And it just blows me away, because it's all because o' you thinking about everything too damn much until you have it all turned upside down and it doesn't even make sense anymore, and I know you probably bit your fingernails while you thought about it. And you think you think about it too much, but then you can never make up your mind t'stop--All of that. I love it even _more._ And that's pretty fucked-up."

Elijah blinked, and his lips might have twitched a little. "Maybe it is," he admitted, cocking his head to look at Dom consideringly. "But look at you, standing over there like you _didn't_ know." He smiled reluctantly, surprising himself. "You're... cute." His eyes went back to the shower stall. "It's sad, this moth being trapped here. It's pretty, but it'll probably starve to death. I don't think I can catch it."

He was looking at the moth again, but he knew Dom was slightly thrown before he closed the door again (and locked it this time). When Dom slid up behind him, legs snugged close behind Lij's and the press of his cock on Lij's ass, he might have been laughing or crying, but Elijah had a fair idea it was both. Relief, a hysterical spring of it. Elijah was laughing and crying too, somewhat shakily, sagging against Dom's arms wrapped around his ribcage and bending his head while the back of his neck tingled with the brushes of Dom's lips.

Then he was struggling to breathe evenly as Dom's hands pushed hastily up under his shirt and down under his pants. "I'm going to start wearing just boxers all the time," he whispered and felt the rumble of Dom's laughter, delicious!, against his back and shivery.

"Or nothing," Dom suggested, and got Elijah's fly open and his hand inside.

"Mmmmh--," raising his hips to push pants and boxers off, "--that too." Dom was just in boxers. It didn't take long to arrange everything, and of course, they were in the bathroom. Dom's hands didn't budge from his hips--Lij just reached to the side and fumbled in the drawer for lube.

It was blind and fast, apology, claiming, catharsis. He was facing away from Dom (facing, of all things, the moth in the shower stall, too, and if you really thought about it they were sitting on the toilet, so he didn't), Dom's hands carefully guiding him into place, urging him down until for the second time that night he felt his body pressed, then invaded, giving slickly to Dom's cock. There was the hard pressure he'd wanted to feel and the slight pain burning away the edges of his mind while the pleasure suffused him like insidious poison and his body gasped with greedy need. First stroke, deep. Second, as deep and faster, so Dom moaned behind him.

He wanted to slow, really, but it wasn't worth his last dregs of restraint, and he didn't know where he'd have to find them, somewhere in pitiful tatters. It had been a wild ride of a night.

He couldn't kiss properly, like this, and that was what he would probably have the energy to regret more than fleetingly later when he wasn't laughing and catching his voice on hidden snags of pleasure in his chest. When he leaned back into Dom, he could drop his head onto Dom's shoulder. Their sweat mingled, and the undulating rise and fall of his body was like an obscene belly-dance with the bands of Dom's fingers shocking on the sharp crescents of Elijah's white hips. The angle, too--

Mmmmm. A sharp press, there, that stretched him pleasantly and set off little strings of firecrackers in the confusion in the pit of his stomach. He rotated, then bucked his hips importunately, and cried out. It was like trying to catch water in the fingers of one hand, almost in reach and almost his but the feeling speeding away again.

"Lij," Dom groaned.

No, he was too far lost. Dom tightened his grasp enough to slow his movements, and started to meet them with deliberate little rolling thrusts. There went his brain, in a gravelly slough of mocking pleasure. It seized his throat, scraped like fingernails on his scalp, curled his toes, fluttered his eyelids, owned him. They seemed to come together, shuddering hard and shaking, and Dom was definitely crying on his shoulder. He was crying too, of course. God, they were such a couple of mushballs.

Lij's lips trembled, mouth still open, for long minutes afterward with the aftershocks. This was before they could even gather themselves together to shift around for a kiss, and then, as soon as their mouths would reach--when Lij's thighs were still sticky and he was still halfway in Dom's lap and halfway not, his neck craning around, and he had to lift his face to make their mouths reach. For a thousand of these kisses deep enough to drink. Then he forgot that, going sleepily clingy and wrapping himself around Dom while Dom wrapped around him, a pair of hideously co-dependent vines, heh.

There was nothing like Dom's hand possessive on the crease of his thigh, the small of his back, his hip. Nothing but that and the scaly rippling sound against his lips and puffs of damp breath when Dom laughed, "I'm half out of my head with you, so fucking sweet," and licked a delicate outline around the edge of his lips.

Well, that quickly got a little overwhelmingly mushy for them, so they got up and went in the kitchen (but they left all of Elijah's clothes except his boxers on the floor--"to shock Billy in the morning," Dom said). Also, Dom wanted to make Elijah swallow another several glasses of water before bed, which he wouldn't do without rolling his eyes and claiming a few kisses as reward, but.

"You're cute when you nag," he said over the top of the glass, and Dom flicked the tip of his nose with a fingertip. "Ow. Hey."

Of course, they _could_ have gone to bed, which Dom seemed to rather want to do, but Elijah couldn't sleep so soon with his brain feverishly bright, so he went to stand by the sliding doors, and soon enough felt Dom lean up against his back and rest his chin on Lij's shoulder from behind. It was a sharp chin, but he made up for it with damp breath on Lij's neck.

"You know," said that scratchy-sleepy-contemplative voice after a while, "It wasn't _because_ I found out. It wasn't _because_ I knew. I would have, already. Maybe tonight. Maybe before if I hadn't found out. You know that, right?"

Elijah tilted his head to the side, far enough that he could just see Dom's profile, or at least his nose, out of the corner of his eye. There were a million sensible responses to that, and Elijah chose the least sensible, though in an insane sideways way it might have been the closest to truth: "I know." Then a fit of honesty made him pause. "Well, no, I _didn't._ I almost did, if I thought about it. But it doesn't really matter--" He added smugly "--because _you_ know it, and you can know it for me."

Dom smiled next to his ear--he could feel it--and tightened his arms around Elijah's narrow ribcage, staring out the window again at the stark obscurity of the night. "I'm yours, now, is that it? I'll follow you around, making sure you eat and drink and aren't late, picking up your handkerchiefs--"

"Damn straight."

"Aggressive little thing, aren't you," said Dom, with his lips buried in the nape of Elijah's neck, and pushed apart the fingers of Elijah's hand to press soft warm paper in them from somewhere. A whisper, "Here's your handkerchief." It was the napkin.

End


End file.
